


Skimming Stones

by gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 13:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 33,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Rose and the metacrisis Doctor in Pete's Universe, timelines don't always run parallel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes [this deleted scene](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcqdojFsuNo) as canon.

The Doctor doesn’t mean for it to be a big secret. It’s a  _surprise_ , anyway, not a secret at all, and the two are very different things. The distinction doesn’t seem to make much difference to Rose, or prevent her knickers from getting in a proper twist over the whole thing.

He hadn’t expected to find the exact supplies he needed, tucked away in the corners of certain Torchwood vaults and accessed by way of psychic paper and quick talking. With Donna’s suggestions for accelerating the growth of the TARDIS coral, the new TARDIS has grown even faster than the Doctor had imagined possible. Shatterfrying the plasmic shell had been tricky – and had singed his eyebrows and sublimated a nearby frozen pond right into vapor, leaving a dry hole in the ground afterward and landing him in Pete Tyler’s Torchwood office for a conversation about environmental impact and how touchy certain city councils can be about unexpectedly pond-less parks. (Not a peep said between them about his eyebrows, though.) The Doctor had modified the TARDIS’ dimensional stabilizer to a foldback harmonic of 36.3 (without sublimating a single drop of water,  _thankyouverymuch_ ), and the growth hadn’t just accelerated by the power of fifty-nine; it had accelerated by the power of two hundred and fifty-nine!

Brilliant, brilliant Donna Noble.

Which means that after only four weeks in this universe, zeppelins in the sky and Rose Tyler in the Doctor’s life again on a daily basis, the TARDIS is practically vortex-worthy.

He just wishes things were going so well with Rose.

It’s not that things are going  _poorly,_ necessarily. But  _slowly._ So slowly, he can feel his cells aging, his hair turning grey, his wrinkles deepening.

He didn’t expect things to pick up exactly where they’d left off, before Canary Wharf. Hand-holding, the easy way they were around each other, so in-tune on practically everything. No, he hadn’t had expectations. But he won’t deny, there had been quite a bit of  _hope_. 

Then there was an additional hope that blossomed into existence with that kiss on the beach in Norway, a hope that picking up where they’d left off meant things would keep moving on that trajectory – lips meeting lips, that was certainly nice. Arms wrapping around each other’s bodies, well that was more than nice. Long hugs, less clothing, the Doctor wouldn’t mind something along those lines.

At this point, the Doctor has decided he’d settle for Rose actually slowing down long enough to say something –  _anything_  – she’s thinking and feeling. Not that the Doctor’s setting any bars, in that regard; he gets this cold feeling in his chest ( _on the side without the heart_ ) when he opens his mouth and tries to say the words again ( _I love you, Rose Tyler_ ), or when he tries to ask her what she’s thinking ( _nineteen years old and she was an open book, twenty-six and she’s a sphinx, are all human women so maddening?_ ), or when he tries to ask whether or not she might still feel a bit of love for him in return ( _is he emotionally demanding? Is that the sort of man he is now? Emotionally demanding and not ginger?_ ).

But Rose isn’t slowing down. The minute the zeppelin touched down in London, she barreled off to the Torchwood office, and the Doctor followed in her wake. She dragged him along on a few of her missions, and it was illuminating to see her in the field, to see this person she’d become while they were apart.

The Doctor doesn’t mind — mostly — if Rose still wants to work for Torchwood. But as soon as he’d raided the Torchwood vaults for his TARDIS-growing supplies, he started begging off when she reported for her assignments, because he’s got no inclination to join the ranks as some sort of agent. Six or so incarnations ago, maybe, but he’s just not that sort of man anymore.

No matter how often Pete has admonished Rose to take some time off, and Jackie’s had her over for “girl talk” over tea, Rose has gone into the office every day, anyway. Which, if nothing else, has given the Doctor ample time to work on the TARDIS.

Rose comes home to her flat every evening, exhausted, and falls right onto the sofa beside him. They sit and watch telly, until she begins snoring on his shoulder. So he carries her into the one bedroom, and goes back out to sleep on the sofa. Not because he wants to, but because she’s never invited him to stay.

Even on the weekends, Rose drags the Doctor to Pete and Jackie’s place, they spend days by the pool and playing with Tony and there’s never any time that’s just  _them,_ just a life, day after day.

The Doctor might be thick sometimes, but he knows avoidance behavior when he sees it. He knows, because she’s taken a page from his own playbook, the one he’d used back when Rose Tyler lived inside his TARDIS – running from one thing to the next, never slowing down long enough to talk, never acknowledging his feelings for this fragile human woman because they terrified him so thoroughly he couldn’t think straight.

Now, here in another universe, their roles are reversed. The Doctor is fragile, and Rose is the one running, hurrying, terrified.

And for the (single, human) life of him, the Doctor can’t begin to understand  _why_.

Except, of course, for the simplest, most logical explanation. Occam’s razor – sharp and painful as it is – Rose Tyler doesn’t love him back. Maybe she did, once upon a time, before he couldn’t break down the walls of the universe to bring her home, before he’d stranded her here the first time, before the stars had gone out and she’d come to find him because only he knew how to stop it from happening. Before he lost one heart and a handful of regenerations, and became so much more mundane.

Maybe she loved him, before all that. But maybe not anymore.

And all this avoidance, all the hurrying and nervous glances when she thinks he isn’t looking, they’re because she’s building up the nerve to tell him that he isn’t what she wants.

The more he thinks about that kiss on the beach, the more the Doctor wonders if what he’d interpreted as passion and want, wasn’t those things at all. Maybe it was _goodbye_ or  _I’m sorry._ Maybe she’d intended to walk away from him after that kiss, to take the other Doctor’s hand and slip right back into his TARDIS, but she never got the chance to do it, because the other him was such a coward that he didn’t even stay long enough to allow for a goodbye.

Maybe, after all, that other version of himself knew which choice Rose would make, so he forced her hand and walked away.

Today, the Doctor’s the one coming back to the flat late, for once. The telly’s on – it’s the only light in the room – and Rose is asleep on the couch already, curled on her side with her hands tucked under her cheek. She’s barefooted, but still in her work clothes.

He strips off his jacket and stands beside the couch for a long moment, watching her. Thinking about all the times, in that other universe, he’d catalogued the extensive list of things he would give up in order to be with this human again.

And now here they are, together, practically strangers. He’s spent more time with his newborn TARDIS than with Rose.

Everything on this side of the void is on its head.

Letting out a silent sigh, the Doctor leans down to slip one arm under her knees and the other beneath her shoulders. “Easy does it,” he murmurs, lifting her into his arms.

“Mmm?” Rose blinks, squints, wriggles pleasantly in his grip. He navigates through the living room, sliding sideways through the bedroom door so he doesn’t bump her feet into the doorframe. “Where’ve you been?”

“Just seeing to a few things,” he replies.

“Zizn’t like you, bein’ out late,” she says, tiredness slurring her words.

How many times have they been out late together, swimming in effervescent pools beneath waterfalls turned rainbow colors by the light of triplet moons, or nibbling their way through a maze of edible vines beneath a sky-full of foreign constellations, or sitting out on the roof of Jackie Tyler’s old building in the Powell Estate and listening to the midnight roar of London traffic. It  _is_  like him, being out late – it’s like _both_ of them. Just not here, in this universe, tiptoeing around a normal life with Rose Tyler.

“I’m full of surprises,” he replies dourly.

Before he can move away from the bed, retreat into the living room, she catches his hand, lazily tugging his fingers. “Stay.”

His one heart lurches – thumping fast enough for two, aching and wanting. Wanting her to want this, to want him here, to want him close.

It’s painful, how much he needs her. It’s  _petrifying_. His single heart can’t pump blood fast enough, he’s lightheaded. The deepest, oldest part of him tugs him in the other direction, whispers from the depths of his gut, “ _Run!”_

“Okay,” he says.

Rose wiggles over on the bed, making room. The Doctor settles down beside her, tentatively resting his forearm on her hip. She seems asleep already, humming contentedly and snuggling against him. It’s the most natural of gestures, unguarded and as easy as breathing.

The Doctor’s own breathing has practically stopped, and he tips his head forward, resting his lips against the crown of her head. She hums again, nuzzling closer to his side. Her leg slides across his thigh, her arm across his chest, her weight on his shoulder and torso.

“’Night, Doctor,” she mumbles, breath hot against his bicep.

He isn’t tired, not in the slightest; he can feel every inch of her, so soft and vulnerable and right here, because she wants to be. For the first time since he came to this universe, since he lost his TARDIS to another version of himself, he feels like he’s home.

“Goodnight, Rose,” he replies softly, pulling the duvet across them both before he wraps his arms around her. 


	2. Chapter 2

Rose wakes up with a terrible crick in her neck.

She’s twisted into an uncomfortable position, head craned to the side, one arm numb because it’s pinned under the Doctor’s torso, the other flung across his chest and up one side of his head, her fingers curled on the pillow beside his ear. Her bra is digging into her chest painfully, and her work clothes are twisted and tight, but that discomfort is bearable. Because the Doctor’s half-turned toward her, one arm under the pillow beneath her head and the other hand resting on her hip. His eyes move almost imperceptibly under his closed eyelids, and his breathing is regular. He’s sleeping.

She’d come home last night at her usual time – late. Expecting, as she always did, to find him gone. Because why would he stick around? What was there for him, for the Doctor, here at her mundane flat in London? Nothing. Certainly not the shop-girl he’d picked up in the basement at Henrik’s so many years ago; not even the woman who fell into the void at Canary Wharf. Rose isn’t either one of those people anymore. She’d hardly know them, much less expect the Doctor to recognize who she is now.

In desperation, she’d gone with her first instinct and pulled him into Torchwood, shoved enough aliens and adventure his way to keep him busy and occupied and _happy._ But he’d even gotten bored of Torchwood; after a few days rummaging around in the bowels of the building, he’d started wandering off on his own every day, without her.

The Doctor is keeping a secret.

He never asked her to come along, never said a peep about whatever he’s found to keep himself busy. When she asked, he was evasive. Not skillfully, mind – quintessentially Doctor – ineptly, undeniably evasive.

“What have you been doing all day, Doctor?”

Shifty eyes, rubbing at the back of his neck like he’s suddenly developed some sort of alien rash. “Ahh, just a few things. A bit of stuff. Oh look, Pete needs help with the barbecue, I’d best go grab a few power tools!” 

And that was the end of Pete’s prized propane grill.

The Doctor keeping secrets – never a harbinger of good things. Whether it’s a birthday cake that ends up being a carnivorous alien from Fondontia Parallax Minor, or a promise that he really does understand the buttons on the washing machine that ends with all her shirts turned into cotton mulch.

So Rose stays late at the office most evenings, waiting for the day when the Doctor wanders off and doesn’t come back to the flat, because this thing he’s keeping secret has made him happy, and he’s followed after it.

Twice now the Doctor has left her — he managed it on the same beach, even. The second time, he made such a show of pointing out how this metacrisis version of himself is every bit as Doctor as the Time Lord. Same man, same thoughts, same everything.

Although maybe this metacrisis Doctor is different enough that he won’t bother dragging her all the way to Bad Wolf Bay to leave her a third time. 

She hadn’t cried last night, when she came home and he wasn’t here, burning toast on the stove or jiggering with the telly to see if he can pick up reception from planet orbiting a star off the shoulder of Orion. Rose had sat down on the couch without bothering to eat dinner, and there was an infinite well of sadness somewhere below her – bottomless and all-consuming – she was going to fall into it at some point, and never come out again. But she decided she wouldn’t fall in this evening, not yet.

She stared at lights moving on the screen until she fell asleep, and at some point she dreamt the Doctor carried her into her bedroom, and all she could think was  _Stay. Stay. Please, oh god please, stay._

The Doctor stayed.

He’s here, sweltering with her under the duvet, legs tangled together. There’s a bit of perspiration on his cheek, his sideburn is slightly damp, his lips are open. Before she can think better of it, Rose stretches upward, using the hand behind his head to tip his face forward, and presses her mouth to his.

Eyes wide, watching for his reaction, she takes his top lip between hers, then shifts down to his bottom lip. His eyelids flutter open in sleepy surprise. He blinks, his gaze focusing on hers, and she touches the corner of his mouth and whispers, “You stayed.”

“Yeah,” he replies, moving closer, slow as he chases her mouth. He kisses her again – languidly sucking at her bottom lip, making a deep humming noise that sets fire to something in her belly.

“Where were you last night? What were you doing?”

“S’nothing important,” he murmurs, words lost against her mouth, tongue flickering with each syllable.

Rose’s hands are in his hair and her eyes are closed before she can even think about it. She wants this so badly, wants to lose herself in the here and now. She almost lets the other thing go, almost slips right past it without another word. His hand slides around to the small of her back, long fingers finding the skin between her shirt and trousers, and she sucks in a breath. His tongue comes right along with it, ghosting across the inside of her lips, seeking contact.

With a jolt, Rose pushes him away and scrambles out of his arms, sitting up on the bed. The Doctor blinks, pushing up onto his elbow, wounded and confused. The expression on his face makes the back of her neck feel like someone slid an ice cube right down it, makes her want to snog him again just to see him happy.

But not if it means he’ll still be happily evasive. She had enough of that before Canary Wharf, dodging conversations too uncomfortable for him to slog through. His people, his planet, his other companions.

Steeling her resolve, clamping down on the nerves gouging her stomach, Rose says, “Tell me. Whatever it is you’ve been doing every day, this secret you’re keeping – however horrible it is, however it’s going to hurt – please. Tell me.”

“Oh.” His eyes are so wide, bright and brown and full of dawning realization. He sits the rest of the way up, shifting the duvet off his lap and facing her squrely. “Oh, Rose. It’s not a bad secret. It’s a good secret. I never thought – I didn’t –  _oh_.” Reaching out, sliding fingers into her hair and resting a palm on her cheek, he leans forward to press a kiss to her forehead. “Even if it’s a good surprise, do you still want to know?”

Rose exhales, and is startled when it comes out shakily. She leans her face into the hollow of his neck, the collar of his t-shirt scratching her mouth. “Yes.”

“The TARDIS is almost vortex-worthy.”

“What?”

“A matter of weeks, maybe days, and she’ll be stable enough for her maiden voyage.”

Rose pulls away to look at him again. She’s floating, hovering right above the mattress, the weight evaporated from her shoulders. “ _What_?”

A shadow of worry crosses the Doctor’s face. “It is a brilliant surprise, isn’t it? I’d planned to show her to you when she’s ready, we could pop back to see whether or not this universe has a Napoleon, and if he’s as bad at pinochle as the other Napoleon. Though maybe we ought to keep closer to home, just to be safe, since it  _will be_  a test drive. Could hop back to your mum’s three weekends ago and stop myself from complimenting her pot roast — beef jerky, more like — and then having to eat it again every weekend since. We’d cross a few personal timelines, risk a few reapers, but it’d be worth it.”

“How?”

The Doctor leans his head sideways in earnest contemplation, scratching his jaw. “I could slip a note into my own pocket. Or sabotage your mum’s stove. Or pop by the National Beef Association and have them alter a few by-laws—“

“No, Doctor, I mean the TARDIS, how …”

“Donna was right, about everything – shatterfrying the shell and modifying the dimensional stabilizer.” That shadow is back, different this time, tinged with melancholy. “She’s cleverer than she’ll ever know. Every bit of it worked like a charm.”

“We can visit anywhen?” Rose says, seizing his arm in excitement.

The Doctor nods, a small grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“And anywhere?”

“Any planet, any star, any galaxy that ever was or will be,” he replies, beginning to look nearly as giddy as she feels.

“Any universe?” Rose doesn’t know why she said it aloud – she’s certainly thought about him, that other Doctor who she never got to say goodbye to properly. Wondered how he’s doing, with Donna, traveling the stars.

But in a way, Rose has already begun to let him go. However much the thought might occur to her, that other universe, that other Doctor, they aren’t what Rose really wants.

What she wants is right here, in front of her.  _This_  Doctor, the one stayed with her on Bad Wolf Bay, the one who leaves his Chucks in the middle of the bathroom floor so she trips over them in the middle of the night, the one who burnt macaroni and cheese for their first supper at her flat.  _Her_  Doctor.

The grin pulling at the corners of his lips, it’s gone. His mouth is flat, his eyebrows drawn together. “I … I don’t think so, Rose. Even if there was a crack between the universes left, piloting the TARDIS through would be –”

“Never mind,” Rose interrupts, bouncing forward, practically into his lap. “Can we go now, to see her? I want to see her!”

The Doctor’s hands tighten on her waist, pressing her hips down, settling her square on his thighs. His expression is still dark, like a distant thundercloud; he’s staring at her with intense, predatory focus. Rose can’t breathe, because the words  _any universe_ are still hovering between them _,_ and his brown eyes might as well be bright blue, framed by a big nose and ears and black hair, flashing with hurt jealousy over a certain Captain Jack Harkness.

Her lips part, because she ought to say something, she ought to explain. Four weeks’ worth of life in this universe, and this  _is_  her Doctor, she’s no doubt of that. Of course she’s still worried about the other man in the other blue box in the other universe, because he’s the Doctor, too.

But as far as wanting a life, a lifetime, TARDIS or not, the man whose arms are around her right now is the only one that matters.

“No,” the Doctor says hoarsely, definitively. His fingers dig into her hips so hard, he’s bound to have left little bruises in the precise shape of his fingertips. “We’re not going to see the TARDIS. Not yet.” 


	3. Chapter 3

The Doctor’s gaze falls to Rose’s open lips – poised on the brink of saying something, he’s certain. Maybe something more about that other universe, that other Doctor. Before she can, he leans forward, mouth brutal against hers. He drags her hips forward so she’s right on his lap, so she feels him pressing hard through both their trousers.

Rose kisses him back with abandon, rocking into him so hard they both tumble back onto the bed, and his head thumps solidly against the headboard. Pain rockets across his scalp. His heart is inflating like a balloon, it’s going to burst inside his chest. Since he’s obviously on a time frame, what with the imminent heart popping, the Doctor seizes her by the waist and shoves her up and over, pinning her to the bed beneath him.

Rose giggles in nervous excitement, her face flushed bright red as she beams at him.

It’s simultaneously the most arousing and infuriating thing he’s ever heard. She’s positively glowing, because of him, because of what they’re about to do. Because he’s so completely off-balance, he’s twisting and falling through nothingness, into nothingness, he’s hopelessly lost and still a bit terrified.

One heart, one life, one Rose, all of it so fragile and all of it everything he — skinny limbs and wild brown hair and unstoppable gob — it’s all this incarnation of him has ever wanted.

Shoving his thigh between her legs as he buries his face against her neck, he licks his way down her chest. Right there, on a chain around her neck, is something he hasn’t noticed in all the time they’ve been in this universe together: the key to his old TARDIS.

She’s worn it all this time.

He picks it up between his teeth, runs his tongue over the metal. It’s warm, because it’s been nestled between her breasts all day. It’s been nestled there for years. It tastes like reinforced steel, and the time vortex, and Rose Tyler. 

Her hand finds his face, her fingers slide into his air, fingernails trailing along his scalp. He doesn’t glance away from her gaze, not once — locked together, never wavering, attention focused on each other.

The key drops back to her chest. The Doctor’s mouth is watering, and the exquisite ache between his legs is reaching painful proportions.

“I ought to warn you, I’ve got another secret,” he says.

That wipes the grin right off her face. “Oh really?”

“This new human part of me wants to shag you senseless. Has since … well, always.”

Her breath hitches as he pops open the first few buttons on her blouse, sucks at her skin hard enough to leave a mark.

“And the –  _ah ohgod_  – the Time Lord part of you? How does that feel about the shagging issue?”

“Mmm, the thought of shagging you senseless occurred to the Time Lord part of me sometime just after Ten Downing Street and the Slitheen.”

There isn’t a trace of amusement in the room, not anymore. He lifts his gaze, finds her staring down at him. She strokes his cheek with the back of her fingers. “It occurred to me sometime around Dickens and ghosts at Christmas.”

The right amount of pressure, and the buttons snap right off her blouse, skitter across the duvet. She tugs at his t-shirt, and he yanks at her trousers, and there’s no possible way for him to explore her bare flesh fast enough. There’s not enough of anything, tongues and teeth and hands. Their clothes are on the floor, their bodies are together, the Doctor’s nerve endings so sensitive and new in this body, so untested and untouched, and this is worship. Dark nebulas, recursive time loops, an infinite universe filled with an infinite number of civilizations, vast and impressive and beautiful, and none of it means anything right now.

Everything the Doctor has ever been is condensed down into this moment, extrapolated on every perfect inch of Rose Tyler’s skin, every freckle and hair and sensitive bend of flesh, infinite in complexity and even more beautiful than the Medusa Cascade in its prime, more devastating than the darkest moments at Arcadia. Buried inside of her, nails scratching across his back and legs wrapped around his hips as she gasps his name into his ear, it’s like being remade,  _again_  – through regenerative fire, Time Lord, to metacrisis, to something else entirely, someone else entirely, someone whose very existence is solidified in this moment, with this woman.

Afterward she pulls the Doctor into the shower with her, washes his hair before he pins her against the cold tiles, licks beads of warm water from her collarbones. Her soap smells like bergamot and oranges, but it tastes like ammonium lauryl sulfate and glycerin with faint undertones of human pheromones that, until today, he’s only occasionally caught scent of coming off of her.

There’s no more talk of other universes, no more implications of other Doctors, and the sting of it fades.

Rose phones in to Torchwood and tells them she’s got a fever, she’s going to see the doctor – he snorts so loud at that, she starts giggling, and neither of them stop for a good five minutes, sprawled on the floor and bursting into laughter every time they make eye contact.

They catch a taxi to the Tyler mansion. There’s a gap in the security system around the perimeter, one that the Doctor himself created four weeks ago. In the furthest corner of the extensive garden, stands an abandoned shed. The door opens soundlessly, the hinges recently oiled. Inside the dim space, in the midst of rusted garden tools, stands a palm tree. Its thick trunk is several feet around, vivid green palm fronds brushing against the ceiling, swaying in a breeze that doesn’t exist.

Stomach churning in anticipation, excitement and a few tingling nerves, the Doctor reaches out. Rose’s mouth is hanging open in shock, but her hand finds his automatically, fingers closing tightly around his. They stand together in front of their newborn TARDIS. 

“The chameleon circuit’s still growing,” the Doctor says softly, almost reverently. “She started out as a hairbrush. Spent a few days as a coffee urn, then a fish tank, and a whole week as a baby buggy.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a silver key. “I made this for you.”

The Doctor remembers with perfect clarity the expression on Rose’s face when he’d given her the other TARDIS key, on the landing at the Powell Estate during the Slitheen invasion. The awestruck wonder, the disbelief, the dawning realization that he wasn’t trying to ditch her and never come back.

This time, her eyes gleam with anticipation, because she has a grasp on what this key means, for both of them. Reaching behind her neck, she unhooks her necklace, slides the new TARDIS key next to the old. “How do we get inside?”

With a flourish, the Doctor slides his own key into a hardly visible keyhole camouflaged in the bark. With a click, the trunk of the palm tree swings open. Inside is a tiny console room, about the size of a small lorry. There aren’t any living quarters yet, no hallway leading to miles’ worth of bigger on the inside. It will take years for this TARDIS to grow to even a tenth the size of his old ship, but she’ll grow, there’s no doubt of that.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” Rose squeals exuberantly, bouncing inside and sliding her hands over a bank of controls, the newborn time rotor.

The Doctor steps in after her, beaming, full of pride in this little ship, in the way Rose is already as smitten with this TARDIS as he is.

“It’s a bit tricky, never grown a TARDIS before, but everything seems to be percolating as it should, considering. All the bits are in the proper place. The temporal buffers have been tetchy, but a week’s worth of tinkering, and they seem mostly stable now.”

Rose spins around, grabs his hands and drags him to the console. Beaming with giddy wonder, she begs, “Show me! Show me everything!”

Hours later, after a detailed tour of the console, the Doctor explaining every bob and button, Rose shoves him up against the warm, cream-colored walls and snogs him until he’s unzipping her jacket and pulling at the neck of her t-shirt, his hips grinding of their own volition against hers. He stretches his arms down, picks her up by the hips and sets her on the blinking lights of the console. 

A Cheshire cat grin spreads across her face. Her knees open and she tugs him closer by the front of his shirt, licking her way across the stubbly edge of his jaw. “Now, Doctor, it’s my turn to surprise you. But we should pop over to the house and grab a bite to eat first – for stamina.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows pop up at the promising thought. “I broke into the pool house, and I put a stash of biscuits and tea on-hand for emergencies. Is this going to qualify as an emergency, Rose?”

“Of mauve proportions,” Rose replies, tongue flickering out at him.

“Well then, there’s certainly no need to bother your mum in the main house, is there?” he says, pulling Rose along as he steps out of the TARDIS.

She pulls up short, hand going to her neck. “My key’s come off!” She puckers her lips at him in mock disapproval. “Butterfingers.”

He’d been pawing at her chest a few minutes ago; he smirks, sliding his tongue over his teeth. “I’d do it again.”

“Just a tick.” Rose pops up onto her toes, plants a kiss on the corner of his mouth, and steps back into the palm tree. The door automatically swings closed behind her.

A few silent seconds pass, the Doctor waiting in the dusty shadows of the shed, watching the fronds on the tree sway. Still responding to an unseen wind, they begin to tremble more violently, whipping back and forth like a sudden gale’s come along.

It takes a full quarter of a second for the Doctor to understand what’s happening; the realization hits just before the familiar grinding of time engines fills the shed.

“Rose!” he shouts, lunging forward, digging up to his elbow into his jacket pocket for his own TARDIS key. There’s no answer, and he’s got one hand on the rough trunk of the tree, pounding away, as the TARDIS flickers and fades, the first cycle in the dematerialization process.

“Flip the primary lever up to five hundred!” he shouts, near-frantic. “Flip the lever!”

There’s no response from inside. His fingers finally close on his own key, he yanks it out of his pocket, fumbles at the now-ghostly lock, too dematerialized for him to open.

“Rose!  _Rose!_ ”

With a final, ear-splitting  _vworp_ , the TARDIS vanishes one last time. A thick haze of dust floats in the cold air of the shed, motes dancing in the shafts of light coming in through the filthy windows.

The Doctor stands alone in the claustrophobic little space, mouth agape, body numb, enormous Time Lord brain too stunned to hold more than a few simple thoughts:

The TARDIS is gone.

Rose is gone.

Everything that matters is gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Much later, Rose will go over these moments in her mind a thousand times, reliving them in excruciating detail, trying to remember whether or not she accidentally touched a button, flipped a lever, brushed a gyroscopic stabilizer as she leaned down to pick up her necklace from the floor. But she never can quite recall; all that’s clear are the sound of grinding engines filling the tiny console room, the time rotor flickering to life and undulating up and down, blue light gleaming across everything as it bears her into the vortex, alone in the TARDIS.

Sheer panic doesn’t begin to describe the way she feels.

No matter how much kissing and flirting had been going on during the detailed tour of the console the Doctor gave her that afternoon, she’d paid attention to his instruction. She’d also spent months with a dying TARDIS in an alternate reality, and years dealing with the tech geeks at Torchwood, and has a decent grasp on alien technology. She’s got expert level clearance and everything. Even so, staring at the circular bank of controls in front of her, Rose desperately wonders why this ship can’t simply have a reverse function, like a gearshift on a car.

Just as she decides on a lever, before she even reaches out to shove it upward, the TARDIS lands all on its own with a final, solid  _thud._ Rose throws open the door and stumbles out into the shed.

“Doctor!”

The shed is empty. Rose circles around the palm tree TARDIS, pokes into the dark corners, but there’s no one else here.

Frowning, Rose steps out of the shed. The garden is empty, but he’s bound to be inside the house. Rose practically sprints across the expanse of green to the back door. It isn’t locked, so she lets herself inside.

“Hallo? Doctor? Mum?”

Her stomach’s still growling, so as she walks through the kitchen, she snatches an apple from the bowl on the counter (it’s one Rose has never seen before, hideous and yellow). Munching, she heads into the media room, wondering why the Doctor’s wandered off so far.

“Anybody home?”

Someone’s on the couch, hunkered down low, shock of brown hair just visible over the top of the cushion. He’s playing a video game, grunting and swearing under his breath as his on-screen soldier battles her way through a decimated virtual building.

“Doctor?”

The mop of brown hair pops up higher, and it’s instantly obvious that this isn’t the Doctor. Whoever it is, he’s younger and much smaller. His head turns, torso twisting to follow, blue eyes locking onto her.

“Hey,” Rose says, intending to introduce herself to this boy – he’s got to be about ten. Definitely too old for one of Tony’s friends. As she opens her mouth, it strikes her, that he’s the spitting image of her brother.

The boy’s jaw hangs open, his eyes wide as saucers. He makes a stuttering noise.

Suddenly all the details from the shed into the house begin to click into awareness, things Rose hadn’t paid attention to, because she’d been too focused on finding the Doctor. This morning was a cold Novemeber day, their breath misting in the air when they came to see the TARDIS; on the way inside a few seconds ago, she’d walked across a green lawn, past flowering trees, through warm air. The new bowl she’s never seen before on the kitchen table, a new set of kitchen furniture to match. This flatscreen telly is much larger than it was two days ago, this couch is a different color.

“Rose?” the boy squeaks, disbelief clear in his voice. He rises to his feet, visibly shaken. “Oh my god, Rose, is that you?”

The half-eaten apple falls from Rose’s slack fingers, bounces across the carpet.

She knows precisely who this is, but doesn’t want to say his name aloud, because obviously she’s stumbled into a nightmare. She needs to wake up. Saying his name would be an acknowledgement of the potential reality of what’s happening right now.

“Where’s mum?” Rose says, trying not to catalog all the details that undeniably make this kid her brother – Pete’s eyes, her mum’s ears, the furrow between his eyebrows when he’s upset (like right now, for instance), the way he’s tugging at the hem of his sleeve with nerves – yes, her  _brother_ , easily five years older than he was when she last saw him, two days ago.

“Oh my god. Oh … my …  _god.”_ Tony takes a step backward. “You’re not alien, are you?”

Out of forty-seven cannon jumps across the Void, there were two that Rose has never spoken of to anyone. Hours she’d spent in horrific, dystopian versions of reality, the worst possible version of any reality that could ever exist.

Standing in this plush media room of her mother’s house, staring at this kid, is more bloodcurdling than either of those experiences.

Rose’s training kicks in, and she puts her hands out in a placating gesture, palms forward. The boy is scared, and she’s the cause, and she doesn’t want him acting out of fear – it never leads to anything good. “Tony, I’m not an alien. I’m Rose. Just stay calm for me, okay? I need you to stay calm.”

Tony’s mouth works for a second, teeth clicking, and then a terrific shout: “MUUUUUUUUUUM!  _MUUUUUUUUUM!_ ” He dashes out of the room, and Rose watches him go. Part of her says she ought to chase after him, calm him down.

The other part of her – the part that wins out – says she ought to have a sit-down before she faints.

Jackie Tyler hustles into the room within a matter of minutes, to find Rose on the settee, her head bent forward between her knees. Her eyes are closed and she’s trying to regulate her breathing, trying to keep the panic clawing up her esophagus from tearing her composure limb from limb.

Rose hears a sharp intake of breath and cautiously opens her eyes and lifts her head.

“Rose.” Her name on her mother’s lips is like the release on a pressure valve, something that’s been held in for a long time. “Oh my god, it is you! Isn’t it? Rose?”

“I’m not an alien,” Rose repeats, the words dull and mechanical.

“I was right?” It’s Tony again, cautiously peeking out from behind Jackie. “It’s really her?”

Without taking her eyes off Rose, Jackie grasps him by the shoulder. “Go call your father. Tell him it’s an emergency, tell him to come home now.”

Staring at Rose like she’s a science experiment gone awry, Tony says, “Okay.” He dashes from the room again.

Jackie takes a step closer, and Rose sits upright. There’s a moment of lightheadedness, a wave of vertigo that slowly passes as she measures each inhale and exhale.

“How long has it been?” she asks simply.

“Four years and seven months,” Jackie replies, trembling fingers touching her own mouth as tears well in her eyes. “Give or take a week. We thought you’d – oh god, Rose – we thought –” A strangled sob, and then Jackie throws herself forward, catching Rose in her arms as she collapses onto the settee, too. “You’re alive, you’re here!”

“There was an accident with the TARDIS,” Rose replies, clinging to Jackie like she’s a life raft.

“An accident? What are you talking about?” Jackie replies, hiccupping as she cries. She tucks Rose’s hair behind her ears, examining every inch of her face. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you’ve come back.”

It occurs to Rose, she she’s really stuck her foot in it – one look at Tony and she ought to have dashed straight back to the TARDIS. Because now she’s part of this timeline, part of events. Although she doesn’t pretend to understand all the ramifications, she’s been around the Doctor long enough to know when she’s somewhere she ought not to be.

Of course, as much as she’d paid attention while he pointed out the name of every button and lever on the TARDIS, as much as she acted impressive so he’d keep looking at her with that sense of wonder and admiration, she still doesn’t fully understand the way the TARDIS functions in practice. Sure, she has a vague idea, but it’s one thing to know what the instrumentation panel of an F-16 fighter jet looks like, and another thing entirely to take it up in the air and keep it from careening into a fireball of death.

If Rose walks back out to the TARDIS right now and tries to fly herself five years into the past, to even land within a month of the time she’d left, she might just as well end up in ancient Greece, or a thousand years in the future, or stranded for eternity in the time vortex, for all she knows about the practical aspects of navigating a time machine.

There’s only one person who can sort everything out and send her back, who can fix this.

“Mum,” she says, grabbing Jackie’s hands and squeezing, focusing her attention. “Mum, where’s the Doctor?”

Jackie stares back at her, tears still streaming down her face. “Rose, I don’t know. Nobody does. Haven’t seen him in years. Not since – well – after you left, he didn’t stay around for long, did he?”

A buzzing starts up in Rose’s ears, her cheeks go numb and tingly, and she probably ought to put her head between her knees again. “I think I need a cup of tea.”

With a nod, Jackie wipes the tears from her cheeks. She stands up and pulls Rose to her feet, towing her into the kitchen and depositing her at the table. She begins bustling around with the kettle and rattling cups. “That’s right, a spot of tea, and then your dad’ll come home and sort everything out.”

As much as she wants to share her mother’s unshakeable faith in Pete’s ability to miraculously fix everything, Rose knows she’s going to be the one who sorts this out. Because she’s so very capable, so very responsible, so very clever. It always falls to her, sooner or later – always did, on the dimension cannon project. She spearheaded the taskforce, executed the jumps. Division Chief Rose Tyler.

Her hands ball together on the table, knuckles white.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees movement. Tony’s peeking around the doorframe, leaning around to catch a glimpse of her like she’s some wild, exotic creature.

“Come in here and sit down with your sister, Tony,” Jackie says, waving the empty kettle at him before she sticks it under the faucet to fill it up.

“Dad’s on the way.” Tony edges into the room, watching Rose carefully. “Not gonna eat me, are you?”

Rose arches an eyebrow at him, clenching her hands tighter so they’ll stop shaking. “I dunno. Do you taste like chocolate biscuits?”

Eyes narrowing, Tony raises his hand to his mouth and licks his own wrist. “Nope.” He sticks his tongue out at her.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Rose says with an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose you’re safe.” He comes to sit at the table across from her, chair scraping the marble tiles.

“Where have you been for the last four and a half years, then?” he asks.

“Tony!” Jackie chides, as though he’s asked her something completely inappropriate.

Rose glances between her mum and her brother, bewildered. “Nowhere. I just skipped right over it. Last time I saw you, two days ago, you were five years old.”

“That’s a load of rubbish!” Tony blurts out.

“Yeah.” Rose stares at him, the clever boy. “Yeah it is.”


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor squints at the waves of heat rolling off the distant horizon. The sun is sweltering and merciless, and his skin feels like it’s baking. Hefting the smooth, flat stone in his hand, eyes glued to the sandy ground, he bounces the rock a few times in his palm. Then he brings his arm back and flings it forward in a smooth movement.

The stone seems to move in slow motion, arcing toward the desert floor. It has a glorious spin on it, in the air – and for a soaring moment, he’s certain it’s going to work. It hits with a dull  _thump,_ solid and final, without even the smallest bounce.

“Told you it was bollocks,” Donna says.

“It’s not bollocks!” the Doctor retorts, wheeling around. She’s sitting on a picnic blanket, wearing an enormous floppy hat and a long-sleeved tunic she picked up in the market in Darwin before they headed into the outback, hot on the heels of a distress signal from a crashed Ugwollian cargo ship. “Bedouins skim stones right across the sand, just like you’d skim one across a lake back in merry old England. The physics are the same, even if the materials are slightly different.” He frowns at the rock on the ground in front of him. “It’s not my fault these stones are defective, obviously unsuitable for skimming.”

“Well the Bedouins don’t live in Australia, do they? We’re in the wrong bloody desert. Anyway,  _you_  spent an hour picking them out on the side of the road in Darwin,” Donna says, pursing her lips and pushing to her feet with a sigh and an exaggerated stretch. “Ergo it  _is_  your fault, if the stones are faulty. Their faultiness is your fault.” She pauses. “There’s a limerick in there somewhere.”

“Oi, don’t even think about it,” the Doctor admonishes, waggling a finger at her.

“There once was a looney named Doctor, who … hold on, what rhymes with Doctor?” Donna deposits another stone in his hand.

“Wotcher?” the Doctor says contemplatively, bouncing the stone in his palm, gauging its weight, performing infinitely complex mathematical equations in his head as he prepares to try again. “Töchter? Yes – no – wait, that’s German. Oh, I’ve got it! Proctor!”

“Proctor? As in, someone who imposes order?” Donna guffaws. “That’ll be the day!”

“Keep your eye on the stone,” the Doctor says, with all the calm collectedness of a zen master. He draws his hand back and flings the rock. It follows a lower arc than its predecessor, closer to the ground, and when it hits the sand it rolls over three times before coming to a stop.

With a little jump, the Doctor punches both his fists in the air above his head and lets out a victorious shout. “That counted! That completely counted! Did you  _see_ the way it slid right across the sand!”

Rolling her eyes, Donna picks up her blanket and shakes the sand off before patting him on the shoulder. “Are all the lordy-whatsits from your planet so talented? Must be some rousing games of cricket there.”

“Time Lords,” he reminds her – two years with the Donna Noble from this universe, and she’s never once got it right, but he only pretends to be annoyed. “My people are quite good at most things, actually. Big showy headdresses, pompous ceremonies, childhood trauma.” He wrinkles his nose. “I used to be boffo at cricket, too, y’know.”

“I’ve got a date two nights from now. A proper date, with a proper man,” Donna says, marching off across the sand to where the Doctor’s small zeppelin is anchored to the ground. “I’m not gonna be late, so whatever we’re here to do, let’s get to it.”

Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, the Doctor rocks back on his heels and turns to follow her. “Yes, Sergeant Noble,” he shouts at her back.

He can practically hear her rolling her eyes again. It’s a talent Donna has, just like her counterpart from the other universe, projecting her annoyance without ever making a sound. Grinning, the Doctor troops along behind her.

Donna helps haul up the anchors and they catch a wind, engines purring as they drift deeper into the outback. She settles into the captain’s seat, just behind the steering mechanism, following the point on the compass the Doctor showed her.

She’s pretty decent at piloting – just like the Donna he knew before. Same brash personality, same cleverness, same way of popping his ego when he gets too full of himself. Not everything’s identical, though. This Donna is in graduate school, getting her doctorate in sociology ( _Doctor Donna,_  he’d realized with a pang when he first tracked her down and watched her from a distance, hauling an arm-full of books across the Cambridge campus). Her father’s alive, but her grandfather died when she was young. She’s never been a temp, but she still types faster than any other human the Doctor’s ever met.

Her classes – both the ones she’s teaching and the ones she’s taking – mean that she only travels with him when she’s got a break, summer or Christmas or a long weekend. This happens to be the last week of her summer holiday, and the Doctor picked up the distress call from the crashed Ugwollian ship. In the other universe, Ugwollian vessels were primarily unmanned, fully automated to haul cargo between stars. Which means that hopefully the only thing they’re going to be rescuing is tech, to add to the Doctor’s collection — or, if he’s lucky, the ship won’t be in bad shape, and maybe he’ll be able to use his other salvaged alien bits and bobs to repair it, make it space-worthy again.

Four and a half years he’s been trekking to every corner of the globe to find a ride off this little blue and green rock, doing a bit of good here and there when he finds some trouble to stick his nose into.

It was bleak, the first few years after Rose left. And in the midst of a particularly bad month in the depths of the South American State – a month he still has nightmares about, sometimes, wakes up sweating and on the verge of a panic attack – he’d seen Donna, clear as a vision, standing in her wedding dress in the snow and telling him, “You need someone.”

There are six and a half billion people on Earth, and the Doctor could’ve picked any number of them for a companion. He’s met a few clever enough to keep up, shared an adventure here and there. The Doctor isn’t sure if it’s the half-human part of him or the ingrained Time Lord bit, but he’s more a creature of habit in this incarnation than ever before. So he didn’t pick just anyone; he found Donna again. Sometimes it’s painful, because she’s too much like the Donna he knew before, or too little like her. But most of the time she’s exactly what he needs.

The trick’s going to be convincing her to accompany him off-world when the time comes.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

The Doctor starts, realizes that his mobile is buzzing loudly in his pocket. He pulls it out, takes one look at the number, and shoves it back into his pocket again. “Nope.”

Donna shoots him a sideways look, but doesn’t say anything. A minute later she frowns, pulls her own vibrating mobile out of her trouser pocket. Her frown deepens as she looks at the screen.

“Do you know that one?” She holds it up for the Doctor’s inspection.

It’s the exact same number that was on his own phone a moment ago. He probably shouldn’t be surprised that UNIT has Donna’s mobile number – they’re an intelligence organization, after all. He’s done a bit of freelance work with them, now and again. He’s a permanent alien citizen of the planet, as far as they’re concerned, so they’re bound to keep tabs on his associates.

It doesn’t stop him from being irritated.

Snatching the phone from Donna’s hand, he stabs the “answer” button with his index finger and says in an exaggerated American accent, “Thanks for calling Pato’s Pizza Palace, please leave your order at the beep and we’ll have your pizza delivered in half an hour!” 

“Doctor,” crackles a voice on the other end of the line.

The Doctor sits up straight in his chair, leaning forward. “This isn’t General Williams.” 

“This isn’t UNIT, either. But General Williams was kind enough to engage in some inter-agency cooperation.”

“Pete Tyler,” the Doctor says. “How’s the weather at Canary Wharf?”

“Partly cloudy, or so my assistant tells me,” Pete replies. “I’m not at the office right now, I’m at home. I’ve got a bit of a situation on my hands. One that requires your expertise.”

“I don’t do jobs for Torchwood,” the Doctor replies.

“Rose has come back.”

The news is delivered so bluntly, so suddenly, it’s like a kick to the gut. The Doctor’s breath stops, his face goes ice cold, and he makes a small noise. “Oh.”

Donna turns to stare at him, concern flashing across his face. She even half reaches out, as though she’s worried he might fall over. He waves her hand away.

He sucks in a lungful of air, dread churning in his stomach. “Is she … hurt?”

“She won’t let our med techs come near her, but she seems to be fine, physically.” Pete pauses, the silence heavy. “She came back alone.”

The Doctor would never have asked that question – he wanted to know, more desperately than he’d admit even to himself, he  _needed_  to know. But he never would’ve asked. So he pretends like Pete never said it. “How? A ship?”

“A palm tree.”

The Doctor rocks back in his chair, closes his eyes, squeezing the phone so hard the plastic crackles in his ear. “Right. ‘Course.”

Pete clears his throat. “Will you come?”

“I’m, ah … I’m in the middle of something,” the Doctor says. “But I can be there in a week or so.”

Time. Yes. Good. The Doctor could use a bit of that, to get his head on straight before he faces her again.

“We’ll be expecting you,” Pete says, clipped and professional and every inch the Torchwood Director. “Thank you, Doctor.” The other end of the line goes dead.

Donna lifts an eyebrow at the Doctor. “You’re pale as a sheet – is everything okay?”

“Right as rain,” he lies. “Half an hour to the crash site. Have I shown you the radiation hazard suits I made? Might have a need for those in … ohhhh, about twenty minutes. Yours is purple!” He bounds out of his chair and into the living quarters behind the cockpit.


	6. Chapter 6

Rose kneels on the floor in front of a large cardboard box. She’s in a guest room of the Tyler mansion, the same one she’d stayed in when she first came to this universe. Before the Dimension Cannon and the disappearing stars, she’d laid in this room until the Doctor’s voice woke her up and beckoned her to Norway to say goodbye.

Now Rose is living in this room again, because her furnished apartment was sold years ago, and her belongings boxed up and put into storage. She feels like she’s still sleeping, still waiting for the Doctor’s voice to wake her up again, to bring her back to reality. On the floor in front of her, her entire material existence has been condensed into a fragile cardboard square. There are a handful of knickknacks she’s picked up over the years, none of them significant at all. Her service weapon, cleaned and holstered and neatly tucked away – Pete or Jake’s doing, no doubt.

At the very bottom, underneath everything else, is a blue pinstriped suit, frayed around the cuffs and elbows.

Rose sits back and stares at it for a while before stretching to the bottom of the box and lifting it out. It feels the same as it did when she’d pulled it off of the Doctor’s body before they’d made love. Leaning her head forward, she rests her face against it and takes a deep breath. There’s even the faint hint of the laundry detergent she bought at the store a few days ago – years ago – lingering in the fabric.

Five days she’s been living in limbo in her mother’s house, debating whether having contact with anyone will complicate things, make it more difficult for her to go home. Where is the Doctor, that it would take so long for him to come to her? Pete told her that his intelligence sources assured him the Doctor hasn’t left Earth, not once in the years since she vanished.

The night Rose arrived, after Tony was in bed, Jackie brought Rose a glass of wine. With Pete holding her hand, she told her everything that had happened since she vanished, how the Doctor was as dumbfounded as everyone else.

“He spent months working with a team from Torchwood –  _leading_  it, if you can imagine such a thing. All your old mates from the Dimension Cannon project, Pete told them to do whatever the Doctor asked. He set up a virtual crime scene perimeter around that shed in the garden!

“He’d hardly step foot in your flat, but he was in our house all hours. He was like a wild thing, hardly sleeping at all. And when he did, he’d just drop down wherever he happened to be – the Torchwood lab, my kitchen table, the garden, anywhere at all.

“The longer the Doctor spent with your old work mates, the unhappier he became. I don’t know how else to describe it, but there was a sort of shadow that followed him around, getting darker by the day.

“During the last few weeks, he took Jake to the pub all the time, digging for information. Then he’d come home late at night, asking both of us all sorts of questions, right out of the blue – about you, what you were like during the years he was on the other side of the void, how well you understood alien technology, how much you worked with the alien gadgets Torchwood picks up. What kind of experiments you performed on the TARDIS in that alternate reality, the one where he was dead. Everything you can imagine, he asked.

“Then he came to me and Pete one day, said he’d been avoiding something obvious that was staring him in the face, because he didn’t want to believe it could be true. He was done lying to himself – those were his words. He said you’d taken the TARDIS in an attempt to cross the void again, to find that other Doctor. Given the evidence, he was quite certain of it, in fact. He didn’t believe you ever intended to come back.

“After that, the Doctor helped me pack up the few personal things from your flat, and then he practically disappeared, too.”

Pete had cleared his throat softly, picked up the story. “I occasionally receive intelligence about the Doctor dining with the Prime Minister of the United States of Mexico, or saving a village in Russia from something-or-another, or helping UNIT deal with the last few pockets of surviving Cybermen, the ones in the most remote cyberconversion factories. But we haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

Since that revelation, Rose has scoured over every detail of her last conversation with the Doctor, searching for any reason she’d given him to believe that she didn’t want him – that she’d do something as drastic as stealing the TARDIS in an attempt to return to the other Doctor. She’s been reliving a few choice phrases over and over again, hearing them with increasingly ugly amplitude, twisted and distorted by time, turned into something they weren’t supposed to mean at all. She’s seen herself, pushing buttons on the TARDIS console with knowledgeable swagger for the sake of impressing him, when really she hadn’t been nearly as certain about everything as she made out.

The idea that the Doctor has been alone for nearly five years, believing that Rose used him so terribly, that she seduced him and then stole their ship so she could be with another version of him … everything is so twisted and upside down, the opposite of what she wanted. If Rose can just get the Doctor here, talk to him, explain everything – he’ll fix this mess. Send her back, make it so that none of this ever happened.

He  _is_  the Doctor, after all. Her mad, impossibly clever alien. He saved all of London from being converted into gas-mask zombies, banished the Daleks and Cybermen from Earth all in one go, grew a TARDIS in a matter of weeks so they could see the stars together again.

Surely he can sort out one little tangled timeline.

Brushing her lips across the lapel, Rose carefully re-folds his pinstriped suit, places it in the cardboard box, and stands up. Dusting off her knees, she heads downstairs for dinner.

In some ways this all feels so very natural – spending evenings with her mum and Pete, playing with Tony (it’s not trains anymore, it’s video games, and she only wins half the time). Family, the same thing she and Jackie have been doing since they came across the Void in the first place. The details are different, but they feel less foreign as the hours pass; sometimes, for a few seconds, Rose forgets what’s happened altogether.

Rose and Pete clear dishes from the table while Jackie puts Tony to bed, and a while after the house quiets down, Rose steps onto the back terrace. It’s dark already, a few stars visible overhead through the light pollution of London. The night is warm, still a little bit sticky with the afternoon humidity.

After sitting on the nearby deck chair for a while, listening to the distant hum of traffic and the chirp of crickets, Rose ambles across the garden to the shed. It’s her nightly ritual, coming to visit the TARDIS. It helps her feel grounded, and hopeful. Because this little machine is the means of fixing everything that’s gone wrong in the last five days of her life.

She pushes open the shed door – the hinges are beyond rusted, they’re practically dust, the door mostly propped in place. Inside, the palm tree sits in the dark, planted firmly in the packed earth, fronds waving in a nonexistent breeze. Rose wonders if they’re responding to something no one else can see or sense, disturbance from the time vortex, or a wind that blew through this part of England two hundred years ago.

Sliding her key into the lock, Rose opens the door and steps inside. She’s careful to leave the door open behind her, not willing to risk another unintentional time-jump. The TARDIS interior glows, engines thrumming softly as they idle. She seems dimmer than she was a week ago – Rose wonders if there was a formative telepathic bond forged between this newborn TARDIS and the Doctor, and whether she’s missing him, too.

Rose had watched the other TARDIS wither and die after the Doctor drowned himself in an alternate reality, one that doesn’t exist anymore. One where Donna turned the wrong way on a street one morning, and then sacrificed herself to restore everything, to bring the Doctor back. Rose spent a great deal of time keeping that dying TARDIS company, all the hours when she wasn’t coordinating UNIT operations, she sat in the console room and did exactly what she’s about to do right now.

Lying down on the floor – there’s no chair, no captain’s seat, not yet – she props her legs up on the console, crossing her ankles. The walls and ceiling look different than they did in the other TARDIS, smoother and less organic, more like metal.

“Where did I leave off?” Rose says aloud to the empty room. “It was just after that incident with the werewolf, right? Bit of nasty business – lupine wavelength haemovariforms are nothing to be trifled with. But the Doctor was brilliant, as usual, figuring out the moonlight should refract through the telescope, using the diamond. And afterward he finally managed to land at that Ian Dury gig! It rained the entire concert, and he spilled his soda on my boots, but he let me share his coat to keep dry.”

She grins at the memory – the Doctor pressed against her back, his arms wrapped around her torso as he held the coat closed in front of her body, his chin resting on the crown of her head. She’d felt him humming along with Ian Dury, chest vibrating and the sound deep and rich in his throat. She’d let herself sink right into him, closed her eyes and swayed along as they listened for hours.

“It was a nice evening,” she says, absently patting the floor grating. “I tried to find his albums in this universe, but there never was an Ian Dury here. I don’t suppose I’ll ever hear those songs again.”

There’s a soft noise in the dark outside the door, so innocuous that most people might have ignored it. After months of dimension cannon jumps, Davros and Daleks and every horror in between, Rose’s nervous system is so used to snapping into fight-or-flight mode, she’s not like most people. On her feet in a flash, crouched against the wall of the TARDIS, she silently slips closer to the shed.

“I know you’re there,” she says, squinting at the dark, annoyed at her lack of night vision.

Her declaration prompts another noise, this one louder. Irritation overriding her caution, she barrels out of the TARDIS and slams the door, pausing only for the most cursory of glances around the inside of the shed before dashing into the garden.

The trees are rustling in a gentle breeze, the crickets still chirping. A flash of movement in the thick, high hedges around the side of the house catches her eye, and Rose is off like a shot.

“Oi! Stop!” She’s groping at her left hip out of instinct, reaching for a weapon that isn’t there, adrenaline coursing through her body. The flash of movement slows down, at least. Shoving a few branches aside, she finds Tony, clinging to a branch halfway up the hedge. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a nice night,” he says, wiggling on the branch, swinging back and forth as he kicks his heels. He’s got a big lump in the pocket of his jimjams, probably a rock or some other treasure he found out here in the moonlight, and his little face is puckered into an expression of grave worry. “You won’t tell mum and dad, will you?”

Rose winks at him and shakes her head. “You’ve got it easy, little brother. Mum and I used to live on the sixth floor, I couldn’t climb out a window, I had to sneak right past her bedroom door to go out after my bedtime. Were you looking at the TARDIS? I’ll take you inside again, anytime you want.”

Still fidgeting like he’s got an army of bugs crawling all over him, he shakes his head. “Maybe tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Rose’s forehead wrinkles as he clambers up to the next highest branch with practiced ease – he’s obviously done this quite often – until he’s parallel with an open second story window. Flashing a sly grin, he scoots over and slides inside, disappearing.

With a snort of laughter, Rose returns to the shed.


	7. Chapter 7

The Doctor waits until sunset before he creates a hole in the security net around the Tyler mansion and scales the garden wall. Breaching this security is cake, especially compared to the last nine hours he’s just spent hacking Torchwood’s firewalls, scouring artifact acquisition logs, trying to track down the vault where Pete has stored the TARDIS. To the Doctor’s complete surprise, there was no record of a TARDIS or time machine or even some sort of vague euphemism – chronometrical displacement engine or whatever collection of important-sounding syllables the Torchwood creative writing department could smash together.

Which means either the TARDIS is at Torchwood and off the books – very bad news – or it’s still here, at the Tyler mansion, and Pete’s keeping its existence secret from the other members of the Torchwood board.

The Doctor settles down behind the shrubbery at the furthest corner of the garden, cattycorner to the shed that served as the TARDIS’s nursery so many years ago, and waits. This isn’t his first choice, but it’s the surest means of getting intelligence about what exactly is happening inside the Tyler household. He’d sent the message yesterday afternoon, and now it’s just a matter of hunkering down and waiting for the information to scamper outside.

He’s all too aware of the reality that Rose is probably just inside this house. Years since he’s been in any sort of proximity to her, and the idea still seems like some sort of pipe dream, the game he’d concocted to keep himself from going mental just after she disappeared. Maybe she isn’t a universe away; maybe she’s just a few rooms away. Maybe she’s gone to have a lie-down upstairs, or she’s in the loo, or she’s just popped into the kitchen to make a sandwich. The Doctor would close his eyes and will it to be reality, strain his ears to hear a hint of her voice or the rustle of her clothing. Sometimes he’d get so lost in playing that game that he’d walk into the kitchen believing with every fiber of his being he’d find a head of blond hair and a broad smile waiting for him. But there was never anything except cold silence, hard reality, the brutal truth of what Rose had done.

After sunset, a shadowy figure swings down the branches of a tall bush beside the eastern side of the house and barrels across the lawn with reckless enthusiasm. Squatting against the stone wall, the Doctor watches tracks his trajectory. Within seconds, Tony clambers through the bushes to the Doctor, breathless and bright-eyed.

“I got your message!” he pants in a loud whisper, shoving aside the last branch and holding up a battered, well-worn scrap of psychic paper.  _Happy birthday!_ appears across the surface, scrawled in the Doctor’s angular handwriting.

“Who are you, then?” the Doctor says, squinting at him. “I’m here to see Tony, but he’s a little bloke, much smaller than you.”

Tony rolls his eyes and plops down on the ground next to the Doctor, crossing his legs, mimicking the Doctor’s posture. “Shut up, that’s stupid. I’m too old for that sort of thing to work, y’know. It’s not like I’m nine years old anymore.” He sucks in a few deep breaths, hair hanging down into his eyes, sweat beading on his forehead. “Anyway you’re early, my birthday isn’t for two more months.”

“Yeah, well-l-l-l-l,” the Doctor says, digging into the satchel on the ground next to his hip, “I found this in Australia last week and thought to myself, Tony needs one of these. I’m rubbish at waiting. And surprises. And waiting for surprises, I’m worst of all at that. So here, happy early eleventh birthday!”

He holds out a smooth oblong device the size of his palm, simple and silver with one yellow spot. Tony takes it gingerly in his hands. “It isn’t another blast-fire screamer like last year, is it? Because Mum found that one and thought Dad had been bringing his work home with him, and they had a terrible row about the danger of keeping alien stuff at the house.”

“Did they, now?” the Doctor says, tipping his head back against the stones with a laugh. “Ohh, I’d have paid to be ringside at that match.” He nudges Tony’s arm affectionately. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”

The boy shifts, so he’s facing the Doctor, his face solemn. “I promised to always keep our secret, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“And you promised to visit every year, no matter what. And we’re men of our word, aren’t we Doctor?”

The Doctor nods back at him, matching his solemnity. “Always.”

“Right, so what’s this?” Tony bounces a little in excitement, shoving the silver device toward the Doctor’s face.

The Doctor takes it, lifting it up into the air, turning it sideways, and pressing the yellow spot. A hidden screen flickers to life, deep blue with a circle of light in the center. The circle of light grows larger, resolves resolution, until it’s clear that they’re looking at a star and the fifteen planets circling it. “It’s an Ugwollian astrolabe, meant for navigating between stars, but handy for identifying any landmark in the sky. Just point and shoot” – he taps the yellow button.

Grinning from ear to ear, Tony snatches the device and whirls around, pointing it at another portion of the night sky, and jamming his finger on the yellow button. The screen flickers to life again, zooming in, illuminating every little visual detail of the system around that star. “Wicked!”

Smiling along with Tony, the Doctor watches him repeat the process a few times, even tells him a few details about some of the planets in the astrolabe’s databanks (“In about thirty-five hundred years, that planet’s home of the most delicious hot chocolate in the universe” and “Oh, I had a run-in with the sentient anemonoes from that continent right there – they were put out to realize their neurotoxins don’t work on Time Lords, which made me less amenable to being eaten, because apparently we’re something of a delicacy”).

After a minute turning the astrolabe over in his hands, without looking up, Tony speaks again. “You’re not really here early because of my birthday. You’re here because of my sister.”

Pulling his knees in toward his chest, resting his forearms on his bent legs, the Doctor sniffs and stares at the branches above them, and the stars beyond. “Your dad said he needed help.”

“’Cause Rose made a terrible mistake.”

The Doctor’s eyelids fall closed and he’s utterly still, the evening breeze tickling his skin, fingernails digging into his kneecaps. “Did she say that?”

“Yeah.” There’s a click, Tony’s got the astrolabe aimed at another star and is poking the yellow button again. He wants to ask Tony to recount every single word Rose has said, he needs to know if her hair is long or short, if she’s still wearing her blue leather jacket, if she still bites her bottom lip and stares at her thumbs when she’s embarrassed, if she’s sad – he wants that, in a twisted way, wants her to feel sorry and sad and miserable, but at the same time he can’t stand the thought it, either.

There’s no way to shut off these thoughts, needy and pathetic as they make the Doctor feel . It’s all so very human – Rose always has done that to him, from the first moment he chased a plastic arm into Jackie’s flat at the Powell Estate – she’s pulled him apart, taken him piece by piece and made him  _feel_  – whether he wanted to or not.

He loathes it.

“Rose says that everything –”

The Doctor’s eyes fly open and he rests a hand on Tony’s forearm, stopping his words. It’s wrong, what he’s done, coming here intending to use Tony. “It’s time for me to go.”

Tony’s gaze slips past him, and he grins. “Look, here she is now!”

The Doctor’s head whips around and there she is, strolling across the garden toward the shed.

“She visits the TARDIS every night,” Tony says. The Doctor’s hand clamps over Tony’s mouth, shushing him, pulling him further against the wall, so they’re completely concealed. Tony stares up at him with huge eyes, but the Doctor’s attention is fixed on Rose. Her features are the exact same as he remembers, etched in his mind as clearly as everything else from the morning she seduced him and stole the TARDIS. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, a few wisps hanging down beside her face. She looks so young, with her hair like this and her black long-sleeved t-shirt and her full lips, for an instant he’s standing with her in a basement in Cardiff, the words  _I’m so glad I met you_ on his tongue.

She disappears into the shed, and the Doctor draws Tony closer, whispering in his ear. “Back to the house, quick!”

Tony flings his arms around the Doctor’s shoulders, hugging him tight. “Please say you’ll come again next year, no matter what. You will, won’t you?”

The Doctor weighs the words, the prospect of disappointing Tony, the possibility he might be lying. “I promise. Now run!”

Grinning like they’re in the midst of a most terrific spy game, Tony begins to make his way around the perimeter of the yard. The Doctor waits until he’s halfway around before rising to his feet and moving closer to the shed, standing just outside the door. The TARDIS is here, put right back where Rose had taken it from so many years ago.

Her voice is clear, she’s talking about Scotland, werewolves and punk music. The sound is like a shot to the base of his spine, hot and tingly and slightly nauseating, and he reaches out to steady himself on the doorframe of the shed. The wood creaks. Rose instantly falls silent.

A second later, there’s a distinctly annoyed, “I know you’re there.”

The Doctor’s panic is instinctive and entirely undignified. He jumps backward, trips over a disused shovel, flails and thumps his head on the clapboards of the shed. He’s only just managed to dodge around the side of the building when a rush of movement flies out the door, dashing right after Tony to the opposite end of the garden, blond hair flying.

The Doctor stares after Rose, paralyzed – there’s a painfully familiar scent that lingers in her wake. And after a second, standing this close to the TARDIS, the Doctor realizes he can feel the ship, a low-level telepathic hum in the back of his mind, something he’s been without for so long. The familiarity is so incredibly intoxicating, so comforting, that he’s stepped inside the shed before he can think.

The palm tree, exactly as he remembers it. He fishes around his neck for a chain, pulls out the key, and slips it into the lock.

It still fits.

The interior hasn’t changed in the slightest – odd, although perhaps the other him, in the other universe, hadn’t bothered nurturing her; or perhaps this newborn TARDIS was stunted by the trip through the void; there are dozens of explanations flitting around in the back of the Doctor’s mind, all very logical.

The front of his mind, so very illogical in this moment, makes him close the door and step over to the console. Long fingers stretch across the instrument panels, one hand sliding over so his palm rests atop the primary control lever, and he closes his eyes. Every part of what’s happening right now is from the deepest part of who he is, the boy who ran from Gallifrey, the Time Lord and his time machine, the beckoning of the vortex, the hum of the TARDIS, the familiar throb of the time engines under his trainers, the way his arm moves to flip the switches for a pre-launch sequence, the sigh and pale blue flicker of the time rotor as it comes to life.


	8. Chapter 8

When Rose steps into the shed, the TARDIS seems agitated – fronds swaying, low hum starting up from where her roots would be if she was a proper palm tree.

“Here now, what’s all this?” Rose pats the trunk affectionately and uses her key to open the door.

She catches one look at who’s standing at the console, nearly swallows her own tongue, trips over her feet and lands spread-eagled on the grating.

The Doctor stares down at her, eyebrows lifted halfway up his forehead, bottom lip hanging slightly open. It takes her breath away, how different he looks. It’s been less than a week, for her – for him, the years show. New lines etched around the corners of his mouth and eyes, his face is leaner, the dimple in his right cheek more pronounced. His hair isn’t in its normal carefully coiffed tousle; it sweeps across the crown of his head, bangs hanging down over his forehead. Most jarring are his clothes – she’s so used to seeing him in his pinstriped Doctor uniform. Right now he’s wearing a pair of slim-fitting jeans and an equally unassuming grey t-shirt. The only bit that’s familiar are the red Chucks on his feet.

He looks so ordinary. Like any skinny, handsome bloke – human as can be – one Rose might notice drinking coffee and reading the paper at Monmouth, or browsing the racks at Waterstones.

“Oh,” he says, snatching his hands away from the console, flipping a switch as he does. A blue glow fades from the time rotor, and it occurs to Rose, for the first time, that she might have just caught him trying to take the TARDIS.

Scrambling to her feet, Rose yanks her top down over her exposed midriff and clears her throat. She’s aching to grab him by the front of his shirt and yank him closer and huddle in his arms, bury her face in his neck and tell him that she missed him and she’s sorry and please, please can he just fix all of this?

As though he can read her thoughts, the Doctor crosses his arms, pinning his hands under his biceps, and takes a step back.

Rose shuffles back half a step, too, hovering just inside the TARDIS’s threshold, tucking her hair behind her ears. “That could’ve gone better.”

“I’ve seen worse, in terms of entrances,” he says. “Hannibal’s victory march into Trebia in 218BC. Right inside the city gate, he tripped over his cape – I told him it was too long, but he never listened to me about anything, fired me from his advisory team after the Battle of Zama – but anyway, in Trebia it was right into the mud he went. He had the puddle flogged afterward. Strange bloke.”

Rose’s face is heating up, and she wants to fidget. Instead she shoves her fingers into the back pockets on her jeans, elbows thrust back. There are a dozen variations of what she has to say, all perched right at the back of her throat, and all of them refuse to move.

Exactly three seconds of silence pass, which is apparently two and three-quarters seconds too long for the Doctor. “I’m surprised Pete didn’t cart the TARDIS off to Torchwood, once he found out it was here. The board is pretty firm on that ‘if it’s alien, it’s ours’ policy. I figured they’d put me in one of those vaults at some point, if I wasn’t careful. The alien bits of me, anyway.” 

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Rose finally blurts out. “I don’t know how to fly the TARDIS, not properly. I haven’t been – where you think I was. Doctor, you have to send me back.”

He looks baffled, mouth slack as he rocks up onto the balls of his feet. “To the other” – there’s the shape of a word on his lips, and he visibly switches gears – “universe?”

She’s already bolloxing this up. “No! No, I want to be here. I never wanted to go back to that other universe. I want this.”  _You._ The word doesn’t come out. She clears her throat, pulls her hands out of her pockets. “I need you to send me back four years, seven months and two weeks ago. Just pop back, drop me off, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. We’ll be off to fetch tea and biscuits from the poolhouse.”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” he echoes, like he’s on a time delay.

“I didn’t even touch anything. I think the TARDIS just up and jumped a few years.”

The Doctor’s eyes shift to the ceiling, as if he’s silently communicating with the ship. “I do recall her temporal buffers being tetchy. So it’s been … how long, exactly, since you saw me last?”

“Five days.”

“Right. Yes.” Staring at her with wide eyes, his facial expression entirely blank, the Doctor nods. Backing up until he bumps right into the opposite wall, his body sags, although he attempts to disguise it as a casual lean. “Five days. Right. Okay.”

“Please, Doctor.” Rose says, stepping closer. He blinks, eyebrows drawing together. “Just take me back, drop me off, bob’s your uncle.”

“My uncle’s name was far more difficult to pronounce than ‘Bob,’” he says slowly. He’s staring at her like she’s a puzzle he’s trying to work out, a problem to sort and get rid of; it’s the same expression she’s seen on his face often during their adventures on hundreds of alien worlds.

That look makes her stomach prickle like it’s full of icicles. The Doctor frowns and his eyes shift thoughtfully toward the ceiling again. “I can’t just take you back. It’d be one thing if you’d gone five years into the future and visited the Canadian Emperor. But you haven’t, you’ve exited and re-entered your own timestream.” He’s yanking on his left ear like it’s detachable. “You see what I mean?”

“I’m stuck here,” she says.

“Oh, you’re not stuck here, you can leave the garden anytime you want,” he replies. “You can go anyplace at all. You’re just stuck  _now_.”

Rose lets out a long breath, her knees wobbling. “Well, fuck.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck.” She leans her head forward, grinding the heels of her hands into her closed eyelids, willing herself not to break down completely. She’s going to have a good cry, there’s no question, but she’d rather not have it in front of the Doctor. Head snapping up, she narrows her eyes at him, still propped up against the wall. “I don’t believe you.”

His eyebrows draw together again and he pushes off from the wall with his shoulders, standing up straight. Darker now, his expression is verging on irritation or anger or something worse. “What?”

“I know you. I know what you’re capable of,” Rose says, marching forward, finger pointing at his chest. “You can fix this.”

“Rose,” the Doctor says, frowning at her, “you skipped forward in time, right across the surface of the last five years. If you went back, tried to live those years that originally passed without you … reapers. Fractured reality. Bad things. You get that, yeah? You remember?”

Rose’s face is red-hot, blood rushing in her ears. She stalks right up to him, within arm’s reach, and pokes his chest with her finger. “Don’t you dare stand here and say that I’m being stupid. You’re the one acting like an idiot. This is hardly the first time – bring me a ream of paper, I’ll make a list, dates and times, every single instance the Doctor has acted like an idiot. You waltzing into this TARDIS just now and starting a pre-flight sequence while I was right outside would be page one.”

“I didn’t” – the Doctor sees the way her eyes widen and her nostrils flare, and he amends – “I wouldn’t have.” He slides sideways along the wall, dodging past her, and begins backing toward the exit with steady steps.

“I’ve been hiding in my mum’s house, trying not to become part of events, trying to avoid exactly what happened anyway!” Those icicles are poking right through Rose’s stomach, skewering all her insides; her hands clench into fists, dark spots dance in her vision. Her toes curl inside her trainers, as though she can anchor herself to the grating. “You waited five days! Five days, Doctor! I needed you, and you didn’t come!”

“Four years, seven months, sixteen days, twenty-one hours and thirty-three minutes! I needed you, Rose Tyler, and you weren’t here!” The Doctor is angry, properly angry now, his face white with rage, his hands also balled into fists. “Five hours, five days, five years, five decades, it wouldn’t have mattered – there was no going back, the minute you stepped outside the TARDIS!”

He’s still backing away, edging out of the TARDIS door; he’s going to leave her again. First she’d walked in on him trying to run away with the TARDIS, and now that she’s put a stop to it, he’s about to bolt out the door and vanish off to wherever he’s been hiding for the last few years. Rose was right – no matter the Time Lord Doctor’s reassurances, this half-human Doctor is  _not_  the same man, because he’s not going to bother dragging her to a Norwegian beach to do it a third time.

Rose’s head is white noise, laced with red static bursts of fury and disbelief, and she’ll be damned if she stands around and watches this happen one more time, if she allows him be the one who vanishes first.

Before he can take another step, she strides across the console room and shoves past him, hopping out into the shed. She pauses, whirling around to stare at him one last time, bathed in the gentle yellow light of the TARDIS interior. “I didn’t want him. It was you – five days ago, five years ago, it was only you.” She waves her hand at the palm tree. “But now you have your ship, she’s all yours. Thanks for the consult, Doctor. Your services are no longer needed.”

Tears sting hot in her eyes, and Rose pivots on her heel, taking measured and steady steps toward the house, trying to keep herself from sobbing yet, refusing to reach up and wipe the tears from her cheeks, because she doesn’t want him to see. 


	9. Chapter 9

Staring at Rose until she disappears into the house, the Doctor backs away from the door. His hip bumps against the TARDIS console, his knees wobble and abruptly give out. Mouth full of bile, he plops onto the floor, feeling sicker than he had that one (and only) time he tried saki — a woman named Kiyomi bought him a bottle in a bar, and he ended up sleeping in an alley in Osaka for two days afterward. His breathing comes in short gasps, and his fingers reflexively clench and unclench around one of the console’s support struts.

 _Five days_.

In the other universe, when they were traveling together, the Doctor had always tried to anchor Rose to a sense of logical time progression, taking her to visit Jackie at regular intervals, always popping in chronologically. So Rose could see her mother aging in a way that made sense to a human, so there was order and structure for her to hold onto. But the Doctor hasn’t ever needed that order and structure.

Living a life day after day, hour after hour – the very thing humans are born and bred to do – the Doctor’s beginning to think Time Lords simply aren’t psychologically equipped to cope with this sort of existence, if being subjected to it for so long has fundamentally broken something in him.

Everything the Doctor’s been holding onto during these long years, everything he believed about Rose – everything he assumed she felt – none of it was what it seemed. He’d been so meticulous in his research, so meticulous in withholding judgment, so meticulous in clinging to hope, until the overwhelming force of the evidence had been undeniable. That Rose wanted the other Doctor, the other universe. That she’d spent years not only trying to find him with the Dimension Cannon, but also studying alien time and space travel technology in case the cannon failed. That the only person whose opinion he cared about didn’t believe he was the proper Doctor, not in the way that counted.

He’d tried to cope in the wake of that, feeling his life tick away in seconds that lasted an eternity each, because he’d given them to Rose – every second, the entirety of a human life. And when she left, it was as if she’d shoved it all right back at him, as if he ought to know what to do with it all on his own. He’s been putting one foot in front of the other for so long, grasping at happiness in snippets, resigned to the fact that this is all there could possibly be, until this body gives out and doesn’t regenerate.

Except it was all a massive mistake. Four years, seven months, sixteen days, twenty-one hours and fifty five minutes of mistake, to be exact.

The Doctor looks down at his palm. He doesn’t remember fumbling in his pocket, but he’s got his mobile out, there’s a number on the screen, and he stares at his hand until it stops shaking before he forces himself to push the “send” button, puts it on speakerphone.

After a few rings, there’s a click. “You’d better not be hovering over my flat with that zeppelin of yours, you daft alien. I’ve got a classroom full of first-years waiting for me to bless them with my knowledge in half an hour, I don’t have time to traipse off to Siberia or wherever.”

“Donna,” he says.

Her intake of breath is audible. “Oh my god, what’s happened? Is it Uchechi? Is he okay, what does he need? I’ll be up to the roof in a second, I can call to cancel class when we’re in the air and –”

“No. I’m not at your flat – I’m in London. It isn’t Uchechi. His wife had the baby. It’s a girl, and everyone’s fine, he sent me a message a few hours ago.”

“Then what’s wrong?” she says. Reading him like a book, even when he’s too far away to see.

“Nothing.” The Doctor tips his face forward, thumping his forehead against the top of the phone a few times. “I – ah – was just calling to see how your date went. With the proper bloke.”

There’s an infinite moment of silence. “Where is the Doctor, what have you done with him? Because the Doctor I know doesn’t ring up to chat about my dating life.”

The Doctor thumps his forehead on the phone again. “Sorry, sorry, this was a mistake, I shouldn’t have –”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Thousands upon thousands of possible timelines, realities that never existed and never will, futures diverging into a complex web of paths taken by virtue of a series of potential choices, all of it sprawling inside the Doctor’s head. Vast and intricate, flickering and glowing with potential. What is, what was, what could be, what must not.

“Someone asked me to fix something. But I can’t, not the way they want me to,” he says.

“Since when have things ever worked out with a nice pretty bow on them, Doctor? Isn’t that the point – we muddle through, and if we bungle up in the middle, most times things have a way of working themselves out in the end. Even if it isn’t what we wanted or expected.” Donna pauses. “Hold on, are we still talking about my dating life? Did you do that on purpose?”

In spite of himself, the Doctor grins. “What’s his name?”

“Oi, none of your business! I’ve got class to get to!” she retorts.

“Poor little humans, they have no idea what they’re about to suffer through.”

“The lambs,” she tuts.

“You’ll be brilliant, Donna.”

“Of course I will.” She pauses. “Y’know, if I catch the last train to London, I could be there before sunrise.”

“No, no. I have something to show you later, I’ll swing by in a few days. You’re going to love this.”

“Oh, anything that starts with that sentence, usually ends with us hiding from local law enforcement or going over Niagra Falls on an inflatable pool raft,” Donna says. “I can’t wait.”

The Doctor hangs up and sets down the mobile. He flops backward onto the floor, arms and legs spread wide, and listens to the contented thrumming of the TARDIS’s engines against the back of his skull.

“Your predecessor would give you a walloping, if she found out what you’ve done,” he tells her. “And if you ever do anything like that again, I’ll personally strip you down to parts and use them to make a toaster.”

The ship doesn’t respond.

After a while, the Doctor scoots sideways, pivoting until he’s positioned directly under the console. Digging into his pocket, he pulls out an enormous Swiss Army Knife and pries open a few panels.


	10. Chapter 10

Rose is standing in front of the mirror in her bathroom, putting on the last touches of concealer to cover the circles under her eyes, when she hears her mum yelling from downstairs. The words are indistinct, but the tone is familiar enough.

Jackie wasn’t supposed to be home for another hour.

With a sigh, Rose walks through the guest room, grabbing her shirt along the way, pulling it on and fastening the buttons as she heads down the hallway.

Pete had gone into the office at his usual time this morning, and Tony had gone to football camp, and Jackie had some sort of charity committee she was heading up. She’d called them and canceled, told them she wasn’t coming, but Rose encouraged her to go anyway – she wanted a few hours of quiet to slowly pull herself together. To pretend like she doesn’t care whether the shed outside is still spouting a palm tree. Because she’s certainly not going to go look – just over twelve hours, and she’s managed to avoid even glancing at the back yard.

Rose follows the sound of her mother’s shouting all the way out the front door.

There’s a zeppelin – relatively small, but looming nonetheless – directly over their house. It’s anchored to a few trees in the front, and Jackie is yelling and waving at the gondola windows, trying to get the pilot’s attention. As soon as Rose comes outside, a ladder descends from the gondola door. It rolls down, unfurling in the wind, and slaps the ground about a dozen feet away.

The Doctor’s head pops out the door after it, and he squints at them, his gaze lingering on Jackie. Whirling around with practiced ease, he clambers down the ladder and bounds across the grass to the two women.

“You can’t have that thing here! This is a residential area, we have zoning laws! Get it off of my property!” Jackie howls. Rose is rooted to the spot, watching the Doctor’s hair as it flops in the breeze, studying every detail of his face in full daylight.

She’d forgotten how many freckles he had, or maybe he’s just gotten so many more, spread across his cheeks like points on a map, a guide to the years she’s lost.

He wrinkles his nose and waves a hand at Jackie. “This’ll only take a mo. Assuming your neighbors are phoning the police right now, I’ll be gone before they arrive.” He turns to Rose, tilting his head toward the zeppelin. “There’s a thing happening in Italy. Thought you might want to come along.”

After only one false start, Rose gets words out. “I thought you’d gone.”

“Gone where?” he asks, as though genuinely baffled by the idea.

“Rose Marion Tyler,” Jackie says, rounding on her, one hand on her hip, the other pointing toward the ship. “Get in that zeppelin now, so this looney will fly it out of here and we won’t get fined for airspace violations! I’ll call Jake, he’ll understand. Now go!”

“Call Jake?” the Doctor asks, eyebrow arched.

“I’m meeting –  _was_  meeting – Jake and his boyfriend in twenty minutes,” Rose blurts out. It’s the only reason she’d gotten out of bed – she’s certain there was a chain of phone calls, Jackie to Pete to Jake, all of them worried and wondering if she was going to go through the same sort of breakdown she’d had when she was first stranded in this universe, when the Time Lord hadn’t been able to cross the void and bring her home.

She didn’t have any intention of falling apart so spectacularly this time, of course. But a few days’ worth of huddling up in a blanket, eating ice cream, and watching reality television had seemed warranted, after the revelation that she really was permanently stuck five years in the future, after the catastrophe of her last conversation with the Doctor.

The Doctor is still staring at her, and she stares back, ears ringing with the words they’d both yelled during the row last night, until Jackie’s hand lands firmly against her shoulderblades and shoves her forward, practically straight into him.

“And when you come back, if you bring that zeppelin, I’ll skin you both. Take a taxi next time, like normal people!”

Rose finds her footing and hustles past the Doctor. “Canada is a parliamentary democracy, y’know,” she says in his general direction, reaching up to steady the ladder. He jogs up behind her, shoulders hunched, squinting in the sunlight. “Even if I had an idea of how to steer the TARDIS, I couldn’t have visited the emperor because Canada doesn’t have one. Not in either universe.”

She starts climbing, not looking back, taking the rungs two at a time.

“It does now!” he shouts from below, and then the ladder begins to sway in regular rhythm as he climbs up behind her.

Scrambling into the gondola, Rose takes a quick glance around – she’s in a tiny, cozy living space, complete with a couch and chairs. Just through the two doors to her right, she can see a compact kitchen and a wheelhouse; to the left is a closed door, one that must lead to the sleeping quarters.

It’s immeasurably smaller than the TARDIS, but there’s something distinctly Doctor-like about this space. The organized chaos, papers and gadgets and projects half-finished, furniture well-worn and well-loved, engines humming at a slightly different pitch than any other zeppelin she’s ever flown in, because he’s tinkered with them, made them remarkable.

She turns around to find the Doctor is already inside, flipping the switch to retract the ladder before he winds the crank to bring the anchors up. He’s keeping an eye on Jackie, standing on the grass and squinting up at the zeppelin with one hand shading her face. A warm breeze drifts in through the door, ruffling his hair, making his blue t-shirt flutter against his stomach.

The Doctor’s doing it again, dressing like a normal bloke, so very human. On him, the look is positively exotic. Do these clothes smell like his pinstriped suit? Does he still use the same detergent? Are the pockets on those jeans transdimensional?

Rose is bewildered and mesmerized, all at the same time.

“You had something to do with that, I suppose – the Canadian emperor,” she manages. “Let me guess: a night in jail, some sort of underground political unrest, an alien in disguise, and a quick impeachment of the Canadian PM?”

He doesn’t look at her, but a grin pulls at one corner of his mouth. “Not a single night in jail, thank you. Not that week. The convention center was a dreadnought in disguise. And it’s not my fault that the Canadian people elected an alien bent on strip-mining the Earth for aluminum. Everything turned out all right, though. The emperor’s a savvy lady, you’ll like her.”

The last rung of the ladder pings into place. Staring at the deck, the Doctor dusts off his hands and slips past her to the wheelhouse.

“Is that where we’re going? Ottawa?” Rose asks, following. “But I thought you said Italy.”

“No, I’m not exactly – ah – allowed back inside Ottowa’s city limits for a while.” Plopping down into the captain’s chair, right in front of a large instrument panel, he flips switches and dials like a maestro playing piano. The zeppelin begins to gain altitude, puttering away from the Tyler mansion at steady speed. “Italy it is. Once-in-a-lifetime Earth event, and it’s become a recent hobby of mine, tracking down those sorts of things.”

Rose settles down in the co-captain’s chair, bolted to the floor a few feet away from the Doctor. Now that he’s done fiddling with the controls, his arm is slung across the plastic armrest toward her, dangling as though without thought, fingers occasionally wiggling in time to some music only he can hear.

A few seconds of quiet fall, not heavy or uncomfortable, just the two of them, sharing space. Rose stares down at her thumbs, digging her nails into the pads of her index fingers. Her blood is pulsing with questions, from her scalp to her toes, so many things she needs to know. Why, after she walked out and told him she didn’t want him anymore, he’d come back. Whether he still eats his chips with too much salt, and without vinegar. If he stole this zeppelin, if he has a job, if he’s been happy.

“What do you call her? ‘The Air-Rigger Dirigible International Ship’?” Rose asks, gesturing to the instruments in front of them.

The Doctor half-turns his head, smothering another grin, cheeks twitching with the effort. He snorts derisively as he pats the wheel. “Name her TARDIS? Of course not, that would just be ridiculous. I call her Buoyant Lightship In Matrix Propulsion. Rigged up the light-matrix engines myself.”

“BLIMP for short, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Well done. She’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” He can’t smother his smile anymore, it’s uncontrollable and overwhelming, his pleasure at the fact that she’s complimenting his ship.

The Doctor might be wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but some things never change.

“Where’s the TARDIS, then?”

He shifts in his chair, gaze snapping forward and corners of his mouth flattening out as he surveys the sparse clouds dotting the blue sky in front of them. “Had a thorough look at her last night. Those temporal buffers are far more underdeveloped than I’d originally thought. She needs at least another few months before she’ll be capable of navigating the vortex with any accuracy whatsoever.”

Those words slowly sink in, like water filtering through soil, nourishing the roots of several disturbing ideas Rose hasn’t allowed herself to contemplate deeply before now.

“You’re saying it’s a bit of luck I didn’t end up living out the rest of my days with a pet ankylosaurus.”

The Doctor swallows, adam’s apple bobbing , right hand scratching at the denim across his thigh. His cheeks have gone pallid. “Never grown a TARDIS before. The shatterfying process is tricky, and I might’ve been somewhat, er, hasty in forcing her growth.” He sucks in a deep breath and abruptly leans forward to switch on the autopilot. “Oh, hold on! It’s going to get cold in a minute!”

With that, the Doctor hops up out of his seat, bounding back through the living area. Rose stares after him as he vanishes into the crew quarters, listening as he bangs about, before slowly standing up and following. He re-emerges holding a long coat with a faux-fur hood, obviously cut for a woman. He’s already wearing a puffy dark blue coat of his own, zipped up like a mountain climber.

“Here!” he says, shoving the hooded coat at her. “The heating’s never worked properly, and it turns cold as we gain altitude.”

Rose stares at him, thinking about how many times and places she could’ve landed in the TARDIS, thinking about never seeing her family or the Doctor again. She’s lightheaded and nauseous, her face is cold and her stomach churning.

The Doctor clears his throat, and misunderstanding her silence, blurts out, “It’s only Donna’s, she won’t mind. This universe has a Donna, it turns out! Isn’t that brilliant? She comes with me sometimes, flying around in the BLIMP. But she lives in Oxford most of the time, she’s earning her degree.”

“I know,” Rose replies without thinking. “Torchwood kept tabs on this Donna for a while, once we figured out she was the epicenter of everything. We stopped, when we realized it was just the Donna from the other universe who was the key, not this one. But I never saw her in person, I wasn’t assigned to her case.”

The information seems to surprise him; he fumbles with the coat, a strange expression crossing his face. Clearing his throat, he shakes it out by the shoulders, and holds it for her to slip into. Rose turns around, sliding her right arm in, and then her left. Sweeping her hair off the back of her neck, the Doctor’s fingers graze her skin as he straightens out the collar and hood. “Fits well enough.”

Drawing the coat closed in front, suppressing a shiver, she hunches her shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Rose.”

The words are quiet, subdued. They hang at her back, waiting to be acknowledged. Eyes falling closed, she listens to the sound of the Doctor’s jagged breathing, hardly audible underneath the sound of propellers.

“I know,” she says. She can’t bear to turn around, because she knows the look on his face; she’s seen it a hundred times before, his ancient eyes, full of sorrow, mourning and culpability and the burden of knowing he might have prevented everything that’s happened.

Instead, Rose reaches up to his hand, still hovering near her collar, grips his fingers, squeezes. “I’m sorry, too.” For so many years lost between them, for rowing, for letting him imagine even for an instant that she wanted anyone besides him. For all of it. 

The Doctor sighs, his thumb brushing the nape of her neck, and she lets his hand go.


	11. Chapter 11

“I’ll make us some tea,” Rose says, walking into the galley, leaving him alone beside the couch.

The Doctor stares after her. He can’t put life back the way it was five years ago, but where does that leave them, and the idea of “fixing things”? He’s bumbling through the middle, and no mistake. This process of getting to the part where everything comes out all right in the end, it’s dawned on him that he’s not exactly sure when  _the end_  actually happens. As brilliant as he is at giving rousing speeches and inventing gadgets to save the day, he’s fairly certain neither of those skills will come into play.

Was that it, just now, apologies and quiet forgiveness? Does that mean everything’s fixed?

Nearly five years, and the Doctor had resigned himself to the crushing reality that Rose was gone. But he’d gotten on with things – with life – because what was another sixty or seventy years, to cap off nine hundred?

He’d made goals, dangled carrots, trained himself not to think about Rose for hours at a time. Securing a ride off this blue and green rock, that was goal number one. In the interim he’d set other goals, depending on his optimism that day: getting dressed, shaving, leaving the BLIMP and walking to the little dumpling restaurant he likes, screwing up the nerve to approach Donna for the first time, a solo flight across the Pacific.

Now Rose is here, filling the kettle in his galley, and the Doctor can’t simply ignore the last five years of his existence and pretend like he saw her only last week. The horrific month he spent in the South American State, clawing his way past everything that happened, building a friendship with Donna – the shape he’s made of this half-human existence – he’s taken the good and bad, and crafted it into something. All without Rose, because he  _had_  to.

The Doctor can’t jettison five years’ worth of emotional experience like unwanted ballast.

Except now everything’s already bending, shifting, revealing the space where Rose might still fit, even after all he’s been through without her. Like she could just slide back in, and there are bound to be rough edges – some abrasions, some bruising or bleeding – but this could work.

The prospect is dizzying and terrifying, because the Doctor wants it so desperately that he could almost delude himself he doesn’t want it at all, and if he inhales too deeply, his lungs will never stop filling, and he might just pop.

It’s past time, he decides, to make sure the autopilot isn’t malfunctioning.

He’s in the wheelhouse when Rose brings in two steaming mugs, and hands him one. “What’s our flight time?”

“Eight hours.”

Settling down into the co-captain’s chair, tucking her legs up underneath her, Rose blows on the hot tea. “I’m done with surprises, at least for a while. Had two surprises too many in the last week.  What’s happening in Italy?”

“Strawberries,” the Doctor says.

Rose lifts an eyebrow, her lips puckering at him. He wraps one hand around the mug, letting it warm his fingers, his other hand dangling off the armrest.

“Nemi, just outside of Rome. Wild strawberry harvest, and the Festival of Adonis. The myth says that when her lover died, Venus made his blood into strawberries.” He shrugs a little. “The festival happens every year. But this year’s predicted harvest is once in a century, the ideal temperatures and rainfall, it’s supposed to be spectacular. They’ve so many strawberries, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”

“Ooh, I’m going to have strawberry gelato first. Then strawberry cake! Strawberry wine!” Her grin widens with each word. Licking her lips, she takes a sip of tea.

“Nope. We’re definitely starting with the strawberry jam,” the Doctor says with a calm conviction.

“You’ll just have to spread it on the cake, then.” Rose scratches her earlobe before settling her elbow on the armrest. Her hand drifts into the space between their chairs. The back of the Doctor’s neck prickles as her pinky brushes his, slow and tentative, up and down, as though he’s a wild animal she’s worried will spook. She gradually turns her hand upside down, sliding her fingertips down the length of his hand to press against his. Still staring out the front window, hardly daring to look in her direction, he folds his fingers around her hand, bringing their palms together.

The Doctor hides a grin behind his mug as he swallows a mouthful of tea from the other hand; it burns all the way down. Rose’s cheeks are pink, and she’s staring just as intently out the front window as he is.

“Eight hours, hmm? I suppose we ought to start catching up,” she says.

The Doctor is seized by a vivid image of Rose straddling him right here in the captain’s chair, her heat spread across his lap, breasts within tonguing distance, pupils dilated and gaze fixed on him. Lust-tinged panic grinds through his stomach.

He’s never felt more aware of the fact that in her timeline, they’d made love a week ago; never more aware of the nearly five years since he’s touched any woman in that way. Last time, catastrophe followed. As many nights as he’s laid in his bunk, seeing to his own ever-so-human needs as he lingered in the memories of exploring Rose’s body – the idea of having all that at his fingertips again is utterly overwhelming.

“Catching up?” the Doctor says, trying to keep his voice from cracking and his eyes from going too wide.

Rose grins, tongue touching her upper lip. “I’ll start. A month ago today, the dimension cannon sent me to a universe where London was inhabited by lizard people,” she says, easy as can be. “Green scaly skin, except they walked and talked. Well, I imagine they were talking – I couldn’t understand it, just a hissing noise they made at each other. They’re fast, though. Had me running the minute I hit the ground, locked me right up. Started poking me with a cattle prod thing, hissing like they were asking me questions. They must’ve been baffled when the cannon pulled me back home, and I vanished from the interrogation room.” She sniffs, scrunching up her face. “Never could stand to look at Tony’s iguana after that. The iguana didn’t take it personally, but I think Tony did.”

“Homo reptilia ruled the Earth before humans, it makes sense they’d have survived in at least one alternative universe,” he says. Pauses. “Did it … was it painful? Did they –?”

“I’ve had worse,” Rose says dismissively. She takes in his face, forehead to mouth, and his cheeks start to go numb with blood. “How about you, Doctor? What were you up to, a month ago?”

“Oh. Me?” He casts back into his memories, scrambling to please her, firmly reassuring himself that no matter how much the world is tilting sideways right now, the deck of the ship is  _not_  actually listing. “There’s this warehouse in south London. I traded a bloke the chemical formula for transparent steel in exchange for unlimited use, a place to store my collection of extraterrestrial bits and bobs. Exactly a month ago, I spent three days straight working on the engine from a Borogravian pleasure-cruiser.” Her thumb slides across his, soft and encouraging. “Now six months ago is another story entirely. There’s this little place in Bamako that makes the most delicious poulet yassa you’ve ever had, which is strange considering the cook isn’t even from Earth …”

On it goes for hours, together in the wheelhouse exchanging stories, comparing timelines, revealing glimpses of who they’ve become during their time apart. The Doctor tells Rose not only about his adventures in this universe, but also some of the things he’d done with Martha and Donna before he permanently settled across the void. And it’s a revelation –  _she’s_  a revelation – the breadth of her experiences during the dimension cannon project, the things she’d gone through to find him again.

Long after the sun sets, when they’re sitting in the dim glow of the control panels and staring at the stars together, Rose begins stifling yawns. The Doctor sets her up in the sleeping quarters, in Donna’s top bunk, covers her in blankets and says goodnight.

Before he steps away, she reaches out to stroke his cheek with the back of her fingers. Her words are slurred with tiredness: “I’ve missed you.”

Capturing her hand between his own, the Doctor leans the corner of his mouth against her knuckles.

Six days, she’s missed him.

Just six days.

He hasn’t felt the lack of a second heart in a while; it strikes him less and less as time passes, the inefficiency of this human cardiovascular system. But in this moment, single heart thumping away on the left side of his chest and blood rushing in his ears, the right side of his chest feels vast and painfully still.

“Yeah.”


	12. Chapter 12

Mid-morning, Rose and the Doctor are strolling hand-in-hand through Nemi’s bustling main piazza. The small town is perched high on a slope leading directly into a lake, and the view, glimpsed occasionally between buildings, is idyllic. Parked dirigibles dot the surrounding hills, and the sun gleams off the water, which reflects the bright blue sky. 

The cobblestoned piazza is lined with baskets and boxes and barrels overflowing with ruby-red strawberries, so ripe they’re nearly spoiled. The air is full of the scent of food, and the festive sound of celebration. Vendors in stalls are hawking every sort of strawberry-related concoction the human brain could imagine. As they walk, the Doctor doesn’t hesitate to fill Rose in what happens once mankind finally spreads out among the stars and brings their most beloved foodstuffs with them — the Strawberry Forests of Alnamore, strawberry-fueled rocket propulsion, genetically-engineered rainbow strawberries and the civilizations that worship them.

The shopkeepers call out animatedly in Italian to the milling crowd, swearing by the quality of their wares. The Doctor snatches a green beret from a rack in one of the stalls and settles it on Rose’s head, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Pink and green, like a strawberry! Bella rosa!” he declares with a brilliant smile, happiness plastered all over his face. If she could bottle that look, Rose would never be sober.

She pays the vendor and keeps the beret. Adjusting it to a jaunty angle on her head, she says, “Fine, but when we go to Germany, I’m buying you lederhosen.”

The Doctor bends one leg, bringing his foot up. “I do have nice calves, everyone says so.”

“Everyone, mmm?” Rose says, pointedly glancing around the crowd. “Right now, all I see is a bunch of Italians staring at the nutter with his knee in the air.”

“The nutter with nice calves,” he replies, putting his foot back down with a little hop. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sticks out his elbow. Laughing, Rose slips her arm through his, pulling him forward to another stall, this one selling fried strawberry cakes.

On this perfect morning, the better part of Rose has burrowed down into the illusion that things are so very normal between the two of them. As they were before Canary Wharf even. Comfortable, intimate, no mess, no fuss, everything as it should be. She’s not letting herself think about how angry she should feel, missing out on years she could have spent with the Doctor, missing so many things he’s done and seen and gone through without her. She’s certainly no intention of letting the Doctor catch a glimpse of that simmering right below the surface. Instead, she’s skimming across the top of it, basking in the sunlight, not treading deeply at all.

They spend the rest of the morning and half the afternoon strolling through the picturesque streets with the rest of the crowd, sampling food from practically every vendor. They agree the strawberry beer is far tastier than the strawberry wine, and they’re both three pints in when the stalls begin closing up, shopkeepers bringing down the wooden doors to secure their little mobile shops.

“Mummers!” Rose says, catching sight of the troupe of local actors come streaming out from a nearby building, dressed in Roman garb – togas and leaves in their hair. One woman, strikingly beautiful, is chasing a young man carrying a bow. They settle in front of the central fountain and begin their performance.

“Venus,” the Doctor says, then his gaze shifts to the man. “And Adonis.” The play is simple enough, performed silently, so Rose doesn’t need a translation. The Doctor leans down to murmur in Rose’s ear on occasion anyway, breath warm against her skin, smelling faintly of strawberries. “In the other universe, Venus begged Adonis not to hunt dangerous animals, but he got himself gored by a boar anyway. Here, the story goes that Venus goaded him about his cowardice, and when he died hunting a lion, she blamed herself. A bit maudlin, really, Adonis was a vain prat either way. And Venus wasn’t nearly as pretty as everyone makes out. Although she was brilliant with a bow – shot the hat right off my head, first time I met her.”

Rose swivels her head to stare up at him, but he’s looking at the actors. “You have  _not_ met Venus – or Adonis. No. I refuse to believe it.”

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, shrugging slightly, clearly amused. “The real Adonis knew the proper way to wear a toga, too, not like this chap. He’s folded it all wrong, he might as well be swaddled in a shower curtain. Venus wouldn’t be seen dead with a man who didn’t cut a sharp figure in a toga.”

Rose clicks her teeth closed. She nudges the Doctor’s arm with her shoulder, shoving him away and then reeling him right back in by the elbow. He rocks along with the motion, unprotesting, letting himself be pulled into her side, his hip bumping hers. He’s got a little stubble burn along the underside of his jaw, his lips pinker than usual from all the strawberries, and he stares at her, blinking slowly.

“Rose Tyler, I believe we might be in trouble,” he says, low and serious and full of fierce concentration, in a way that means he’s trying to convince her he’s completely sober, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

“Why’s that, Doctor?” Rose replies, trying to summon an ounce of concern about potential danger, and utterly failing. She’s a bit tipsy, she doesn’t mind admitting. Floating a few inches off the ground, the world buzzing happily around her. There is nothing that could possibly be dangerous here, nothing except the alien bloke next to her, the one who’s staring at her mouth as he licks his bottom lip.

“We forgot our slickers.”

Rose tips her face up, head leaning against his shoulder, and squints at the cloudless blue sky.

“I think we’ll be fine,” she says.

The Doctor tugs away from her, extracting his arm. “I really don’t think we will.”

Rose realizes the mummers have finished their play and disappeared. All the stalls are closed and locked up tight, and the surrounding buildings closed and shuttered. Even the cafe has pulled all its chairs and tables inside. The crowd is shifting, older people making a beeline for shelter, younger people pulling on rain slickers, and some of the men simply yanking off their shirts.

In the center of the piazza, a man hops up onto the edge of the fountain, popping up above the crowd. He’s wearing an enormous, ridiculous hat, his face painted a riot of colors. He waves his hands and bellows a shout, and the crowd grows still.

In spite of the alcohol still drifting through her system, Rose is beginning to feel alarmed. She edges closer to the Doctor as the man atop the fountain announces, “Oggi è la giustizia per Adonis. Al mio tre, ci vendicherà il suo sangue. Uno! Due! Tre –  _vendetta_!”

The crowd breaks in a wild rush of movement, dodging to the edges of the piazza. The Doctor flashes a manic grin at Rose and shouts, “Every Time Lord for himself!” as he darts away.

Rose darts right after, following him to the nearest barrel bursting with overripe strawberries. The Doctor scoops up two enormous handfuls, whirls around, and smashes them directly into her chest. Bright red juice and pulp fly everywhere, across her face and down her clothes, dripping over her bare arms and onto her shoes.

Screeching his name in shock, Rose backs up a step, right into a fighting stance out of sheer instinct, her Torchwood training overriding everything else.

The crowd around them is already in a frenzy, seizing strawberries and flinging them with abandon, pelting each other, screaming and howling in delight.

A strawberry thrown by a stranger zings past Rose’s face, a millimeter in front of her nose; a second one smacks the Doctor on the temple, leaving a red trail dribbling down his cheek. Wincing, he reaches up and flicks the offending fruit away. Three more splatter against his shoulder, and Rose feels a massive bunch smack right against the small of her back, leaving her shirt glued to her back by juice.

“You knew this was going to happen?” Rose says, not sure if she should be laughing or livid.

“A bit, yeah,” he replies. A strawberry’s sailing in a spectacular arc right above his head, and he reaches up to snag it, bringing it down to his mouth and biting it in half.

In a lightning quick movement, Rose darts past the Doctor to the barrel of strawberries, grabbing two handfuls and whirling back around as she shouts, “You’re in for it now!”

The Doctor’s already off and running, headed across the piazza toward another stack of fruit-filled boxes. Rose moves fast, tracking him as he hops up onto the edge of the fountain to escape the crowd, sticking out his arms for balance as he navigates the narrow edge. Of course, getting up above the crowd makes him more of a target, and he’s instantly pummeled by half a dozen flung fruits. Flailing, hardly keeping his feet, he tumbles back onto the cobblestones, losing some of his momentum.

Legs churning, adrenaline roaring through her system, Rose is right after him. She’s being pelted steadily; there’s a relative hailstorm of strawberries, falling in her hair and on her clothes, and she ought to probably worry about the fact that she doesn’t have anything else to wear, but all she can focus on is the Doctor’s lithe form in front of her as he screeches to a halt in front of an already half-empty box of berries and scoops up more ammunition.

Rose is coming with such momentum, and the ground is so slippery with fruit pulp, that she can’t stop herself. The Doctor leaps out of the way just as Rose skids forward, toppling directly into the stack of boxes. The contents tumble all over her and the ground, and for a terrifying second she’s mobbed – the crowd, swooping in to pick up what spilled, smashing strawberries into her hair and body. She flails, closed in and hardly able to breathe, until a hand snatches hers in the melee, long fingers and firm grip, pulling her up off the ground, dragging her away.

Once he has her sheltered against the nearest building, the Doctor surveys her up and down – given his current appearance as the survivor of some kind of strawberry apocalypse, Rose figures she must look pretty ridiculous, too.

“Are you all right?” he asks, face screwed up into a squint as juice drips into one eye.

Gripping his hand tight, Rose nods. “No quarter!” she cries, bringing her other hand – still full of berries – around to squelch into his neck.

With a shout he stumbles backward, wiggling out of her grip, and vanishes down the nearest alley. 


	13. Chapter 13

Out of the piazza and in the narrow alley, the afternoon shadows are long and the temperature’s much cooler. There are few revelers here, and the Doctor ducks into a doorway framed by a metal gate, right into a small, tidy courtyard overgrown with ivy and lined with potted flowers, with a circular bench in the center. It looks a little like the garden-palace of Nool, the one from the other universe, where he and Rose were locked up overnight in a prison cell constructed out of sentient trees. 

He leans against the nearest building to steady himself, gulping for air and swiping strawberries off of his neck. His head is buzzing, beer and human hormones and the fact that today has been the stuff of fantasies – Rose, beside him on an idyllic day, acting as though she believes he’s the proper Doctor.

The Doctor doesn’t have any doubt as to who he is – he was telling the truth on Bad Wolf Bay so many years ago. Same man, same thoughts, same everything. A few bits of non-Time Lord biology don’t diminish who he is, or change him fundamentally, certainly not even as much as a full regeneration would have.

But the idea that Rose had thought him  _less_ , somehow … that she held him up to another version of himself and found this one lacking … that she had tried to break through the walls of the universe to escape from him, to return to the Time Lord with a second heart … it had been like a pointed stick digging into his gut. The same stick that stabbed right through him just after he regenerated from his ninth body into his tenth, when Rose said those words,  _Can you change back?_

For years now, just when the Doctor thought he’d gotten rid of that pointed stick, learned to ignore it, something would happen to twist it again, and he’d realized it really  _did_  matter to him, what Rose thought, who Rose preferred. Because no matter how often the Doctor had tried to convince himself that he’d moved on, that she didn’t matter, his love for this woman didn’t define him … well, he could only hold onto those lies for so long.

And now that Rose is back, now it’s evident that she never found him lacking – that stick is twisting a different direction, trying to pull loose, which leaves the Doctor’s mouth dry and his one heart pounding. Once the stick comes out, he has no idea what the festering wound underneath will look like, how much it will bleed.

The only thing he’s certain of is that being in the midst of that process has turned him upside down, kicked him into flight mode, made him want to find the furthest corner from this wild upheaval and take refuge there. Because all of this  _is_ a fantasy. It’s inevitable Rose will disappear again at some point – the universe seems hell-bent on taking away the things that matter to the Doctor, leaving him alone again and again. He survived losing Rose twice, but he’d rather die than let himself love her unreservedly, without holding back,  and then be forced to live through losing her a third time.

Running has always come so naturally to the Doctor, why stop now?

“You ought to know,” Rose says, and the Doctor’s head snaps up – the world spins, alcohol muddling his brain – she’s walking into the courtyard, dripping red from head to toe, hips swinging, “I have one of the highest success rates in Torchwood history, tracking aliens. It’s a specialty of mine.” She saunters to a stop, hooking her thumbs into the belt loops on her trousers. “Seems sporting, to give you notice.”

He pushes off from the wall, stammering a few incoherent syllables before logic kicks in and he realizes she isn’t reading his thoughts, she’s only referring to the fact that he’d dodged away from her handful of strawberries.

Grinning and licking her teeth, Rose Tyler stands in the open gate, blocking the only exit. And it strikes him, in this moment, exactly how preposterous the idea of running really is.

The Doctor advances so quickly, and with such an expression on his face, Rose actually backs up a step. Arms out, he forces her sideways, right into the gate, which clatters against the wall. He grabs the bars on each side, pinning her in, leaning forward and staring down at her face, all wide eyes and speckled with strawberry juice.

“No quarter,” he says. She’s startled, breathing fast, lips parted. There’s the distinct sound of strawberries hitting the cobblestones as she drops them.

Stillness stretches between them, even with gleeful shouting in the piazza one block over, and birds chirping on the rooftops, and wind whispering between the buildings. The Doctor feels her hand brush his hip, and then his ribs, before she brings it up between them.

“You’ve changed your hair,” Rose murmurs, a tremor in the words. Fingers sweep along his forehead to his temple as she strokes back his fringe. She’s studying his features, unable or unwilling to hide the emotion flickering through her eyes as she maps the years on his face. Her hand skates lower, fingertips lingering on the sensitive skin around the corner of his eye, tracing the laugh lines that have grown deeper since she saw him last, her palm resting against his cheek. Her thumb stretches down to hover over his bottom lip without contact, heat radiating from her skin.

“And you’ve changed your clothes.” Pressure settles in the Doctor’s lungs as her hand shifts down to the strawberry-smeared collar of his t-shirt, one finger hooking underneath, lifting it from his damp chest. “You’ve got a new freckle right … here.” Her index finger touches the side of his neck, rests on his pulse point. He swallows against the thick knot in his throat. “I’ve never seen this one before.”

Expecting his voice to be strained, surprised when it isn’t, the Doctor says, “When  you’re upset, there’s a wrinkle in between your eyebrows, just like I remember.” He leans forward, lips pressing to the precise spot on her forehead. She lets out a tremulous breath, hand fisting around the neck of his shirt, fingernails scraping skin. “And when I surprise you, your cheeks go all pink, just like I remember.” He brushes his mouth against her temple before planting another kiss on her right cheek.

He pulls away, lips coated with juice from her face. She watches as he licks them clean, her back arching slightly as she rocks up onto the balls of her feet, coming closer.

“I’m the Doctor, by the way.” His words  _are_  strained now, that pain in his gut twisting even as the rest of his body is afire, slow and steady and wanting – wanting – _wanting_. It’s been so long since he let his mind go down this path, let it affect him physically, he’s so keyed up on anticipation and fear, his head still fuzzy with alcohol. “What’s your name?”

The corners of Rose’s mouth twitch upward, her nose wrinkling a little. “That chat-up line would be really impressive if you were holding a detonation device of some sort.” She inhales, gaze sweeping across his mouth. “Got one of those on you, Doctor?”

He reaches down, pats his hip. “Fresh out.”

“A girl’s got to have her standards.”

The last syllable of the last word is muffled as the Doctor pulls the bars of the gate, bringing Rose forward as he leans down, his mouth meeting hers. Her eyes go wide and then close, and he presses a slow, soft kiss to her bottom lip, then her top. Her fist tightens on his shirt, pulls his body closer as her other arm slides around his neck.

The Doctor doesn’t trust himself to touch Rose, not yet – his white-knuckled grip on the metal gate anchoring him so he doesn’t sink into the cobblestones or blow away on a gust of wind. But he leans into her, the way she’s arching against him, damp shirts and strawberry-flavored skin. He brings his tongue out instinctively, to lick the juice from his own lips; her tongue is already out to meet his, accompanied by a stuttering rush of breath and a soft whimpering noise.

Both their mouths open, and the Doctor’s head was buzzing already but now it’s positively roaring, blood and beer and every sort of hormone this ridiculous human endocrine system produces. Rose is soft and warm and gentle, fingernails scraping against his scalp as she tugs at his hair, body curving to his.

The way their tongues meet, leisurely and not like he remembers from the last time, so very very long ago. They were frantic, then – rushing, trying to hurry into something because they were both so afraid. Just like he’d rushed growing the TARDIS, forcing something that wasn’t ready yet because he wanted Rose to believe in who he was, what he could give her.

She sucks his bottom lip, teeth scraping and tongue soothing right after. He chases after it, past her lips and into her mouth, slick and hot and welcoming. There’s a hundred flavors, subtle chemical interactions fizzing across his tongue, and he could break them down into component parts and identify them, except none of it matters – it only matters that this is Rose, all of it, all of her.

“Ay ay ay! Lascia! Questa è una casa rispettabile! Ubriaconi!”

Rose flinches in surprise, and the Doctor stumbles back a step, dazed. There’s an elderly woman advancing across the small courtyard, menacingly brandishing a broom at them.

Rose glances at the Doctor, and he says to the woman, “Mi dispiace, mi dispiace tanto.” Out of the side of his mouth, he tells Rose, “Run for your life!”

She grabs his hand, and they sprint back to the piazza. The old woman slams the gate closed behind them with a clatter.

The strawberry fight has turned into a mosh of slippery pulp-covered cobblestones, revelers sliding and wrestling in the muck. After the briefest pause to survey the carnage, the Doctor turns to Rose with the most serious of expressions on his face.

“Do you remember the last time we came to Italy? That incident with the statue? There was a saying, something about when in Nemi …” He leans down, quick as a flash, and scoops up a handful of muddy pulp before depositing it directly on top of her head.

Rose stares at the Doctor, mouth agape and shoulders hunched as strawberry dribbles down her face, before mischief flashes in her eyes and she tackles him to the ground. He goes down, limbs flailing, but she’s moving with purpose, and before he knows it he’s on his back, Rose looming over him, straddling his thighs and hands pinning his shoulders. 

Staring up at her, cobblestones poking into his back and strawberries squelching against his scalp, the Doctor has something infinitely clever to say – clever and devastating and Rose will be impressed, he’s certain of it – but before he can speak, before Rose can lean just a little bit closer, or wiggle her hips again – a siren begins wailing.

Nemi’s fire brigade has no fire engine, only hoses that are hauled around on the back of a small lorry and hooked up to various fireplugs throughout the city, the water pumped up from the lake below. One happens to be located in a corner of the piazza, and the local firemen begin spraying down the crowd and the cobblestones, water running in strawberry-filled rivers down the side-streets.

Rose hops up, dragging the Doctor along, and they join the crowd in front of the hoses for a rinse. It isn’t a proper shower, they’re both still pink afterward – strawberry juice staining clothes and hair. But at least they aren’t sticky anymore.

The shock of lake water blasts away the last effects of the alcohol on the Doctor’s system, puts a damper on those hormones running amok, clears his head enough so that he manages not to gawk at Rose’s soaked top, clinging to the curve of her breasts, her nipples proof of how cold the water is.

Well, the Doctor manages  _mostly_  not to gawk. She only has to clear her throat once, and he lifts his eyes from her chest to find her staring at him, eyebrows arched and hands on her hips. He shrugs and grins, and she smirks at him smugly. 

They linger at a local pizzeria for supper, letting the warm evening dry them out before hitching a ride in the back of a truck to the Doctor’s zeppelin, anchored a few miles outside of the city. They sit on the open tailgate, legs dangling as the truck bumps over the country road.

They don’t try to talk over the roar of the engine and the clatter of gravel. Instead, the Doctor takes Rose’s hand and they stare out across the expanse of Lake Nemi, and the stars glittering to life in the darkening sky. 


	14. Chapter 14

In the little lavatory aboard the Doctor’s zeppelin, Rose steps out of the shower and peers into the tiny mirror above the sink, looking for any trace of strawberry juice lingering in her hair. Zeppelins carry a very limited supply of water, but the Doctor has rigged this shower with sonic enhancements – it was almost like being aboard the TARDIS, in the ensuite that had been attached to Rose’s bedroom – no tidal-pool bathtub or jet-powered sink with five faucets in this tiny loo, of course. But the shower was very familiar, the low soothing buzz of the cleaning mechanism, the way the hair on her arms fluttered and her skin felt cleaner than if she’d only rinsed off with water.

Her hair is fine, but Rose stares at her strawberry-stained clothes for a long, thoughtful minute. Then she wraps up tightly in a towel and steps out into the brightly-lit living space.

The Doctor is sitting on the couch, one arm stretched out along the back as he reads something and waits for his turn to clean up.

Skin prickling even though it isn’t cold, Rose clears her throat and waves her stained shirt in his direction, like a matador. “My clothes are a bit of a mess, and someone forgot to warn me to bring a change before we left London. Don’t suppose Donna left something onboard I could borrow?”

The Doctor swivels his head, catches sight of her in the towel, and pops to his feet and spins to face her in a sudden jerky movement, like a marionette pulled from the ceiling. Shuffling backward, he rubs at the nape of his neck, his eyes riveted to the wall.

“Right – yes – there ought to be – I mean in the crew quarters there’s a wardrobe – you can just – whatever you need.” He looks like he’s trying to rub a bald spot at the base of his skull. Whatever mental space he’d been in during their day in Nemi, pinning her against a gate and snogging her so thoroughly her knees had gone to jelly, feeding her pizza from across the table at dinner – he’s well out of it now.

It’s something she has to remind herself of on a minute-by-minute basis, the fact that he hasn’t seen her in nearly five years. That he’s been living his life, day after day, believing she’d abandoned him.

This is most certainly not the same Doctor she slept with a week ago. Simply pretending he is won’t do either of them any favors. It won’t help Rose move past the flashes of anger she feels about the fact that all of this has happened ( _it isn’t his fault, it isn’t his fault_ , if she repeats it enough times it will sink in). And it won’t help the Doctor, if she pushes some sort of intimacy he’s not ready for, if she cannonballs into the complex stew of emotions he seems to be brewing right now.

“Your turn,” Rose says, side-stepping around the perimeter of the room. Her cheeks are stinging, a blush creeping down her neck and to her chest. She should’ve put on the sticky strawberry-covered clothes, she’s made him uncomfortable. The last thing she wants to do is break whatever fragile thing it is they’re forging.

“Of course, I’ll – I’ll just –” He shuffles around the opposite side of the couch, slips into the loo, and the door clicks closed behind him.

Clutching the towel around her chest and hip, Rose hustles into the sleeping quarters. There’s a small cupboard, and a few things that obviously don’t belong to the Doctor: a set of high-heeled boots, a few tubes of lipstick, and a hair curler. But even though she’d left her coat, Donna hasn’t stored any clothes here, and Rose finds herself rifling through the Doctor’s trousers and shirts, trying to find something that fits.

He’s skinny enough, but his trousers are all too long and none of them work on her hips, so she’s reduced to wearing pair of boxer briefs and a t-shirt (it’s soft and faded, with a black and white hippo dancing across a logo for Disneyland Bangalore). Balancing on one leg, the other folded up like a flamingo, she runs her hand over her prickly shin and curses the fact that she didn’t bother to shave the day she left London.

She’s still digging through the unfolded jumble of clothes in the Doctor’s wardrobe, looking for something to wear besides his pants, when there’s a knock at the open door.

“Did you – oh.”

He’s standing in a towel, damp hair hanging in his eyes, one hand fisted around terrycloth at his hip. A scar she’s never seen before stretches around the head of his left shoulder, long and thin and jagged. He’s every bit as wiry as she remembers, though, hair sprinkled across his chest and forearms and running in a light brown line below his navel.

“I can try washing out my clothes in the sink,” Rose says, snatching one hand out of the wardrobe and letting go of her unshaven leg with the other, her foot dropping back to the floor. Her toes curl into the short pile of the carpet.

“No, that’s fine, it’s fine.” He backs up a step, out of the doorway. “I thought we’d stay anchored while we rest tonight and head back to London at first light.”

“The festival’s over?” She keeps the frown away from her mouth, but can’t stop the disappointment from seeping into her tone of voice.

“Well-l-l-l-l, Adonis is avenged. Plus all the strawberries are gone. Life is back to normal for the citizens of Nemi,” he replies, rocking back on his heels, his right hand fumbling at his hip, as though he expects his towel to have pockets. He ends up nervously drumming his fingers on his thigh instead. “Plus, I thought you’d be checking in with Torchwood. Before you – before what happened, you were so wrapped up in your cases, and everything. ‘Course there will be new cases now, I expect …” He trails off, staring at her somewhat helplessly. “But there’s another thing happening in Thailand, next week. If Torchwood can spare you.” He takes a breath. “If you want.”

“Yes.” Her reply is instant, without hesitation; his gaze meets hers. “Yes, I want.”

A smile spreads across his face. “Well that’s settled, then.”

Rose steps away from the wardrobe, toward him and the door. He backs up, making room for her to pass. She scoots by, thinking about her bra, still hanging on a hook in the loo, and the fact that the windows are open in the living quarters, and a cool breeze off the lake is blowing through.

“I’ll just leave you to it, then,” she says.

“Just be a mo’.” He shuts the door. Rose fetches her bra, and situates herself on the couch. The Doctor’s book is open on the side table; it’s a thick thing, titled  _The Education of Young Samuel Cooper: A Warlock’s Tale._ She’s four pages in when the Doctor joins her, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and black t-shirt, his towel-dried hair fluffy atop his head.

“It’s going to take me a while to get used to,” she blurts out. He lifts his eyebrows at her as he settles on the opposite end of the couch.

“Samuel Cooper isn’t nearly as clever a name as Harry Potter, true,” he says. “But if you’re implying that I happened to run into this universe’s JK Rowling in a café in Edinburgh, and we had a chat, you’d be completely correct.”

“No, I mean …” Rose waves in his general direction. “Without the suit.”

The Doctor’s hand comes up, tugging at the neckline of his black t-shirt and smoothing the fabric across his chest. “The suit was falling apart, without the TARDIS’s laundering systems to regenerate the fabric on a regular basis. And these just – they feel right. Same way the leather jacket felt right, before.”

“I like it,” Rose rushes to add, hugging the book to her stomach. “The jeans and everything. It’s just so different.”

“I used to really like your hoodies. I mean, the blue leather looks nice on you, too. But the hoodies were so soft,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “Y’know, your pink and grey ones. I always meant to ask – what’s a ‘Punky Fish’?”

Laughter bubbles out of Rose’s throat. “I’m not sure. A fish with an attitude problem and some biker tattoos, probably.” She lifts the book, flipping a few pages. “But the important question is, do you get any royalties for this? Or did JK at least dedicate her story to the skinny stranger with the unstoppable gob she met in the Edinburgh café?”

He laughs, too. “Rose Tyler, are you insinuating I’d nudge JK Rowling toward writing an important piece of children’s literature simply for the sake of my own financial gain? I. Am.  _Offended_. My intentions were entirely noble: I can’t stand the idea of any universe being deprived of such a glorious masterpiece! And I might’ve mentioned the idea of warlocks and a magic school during our conversation, but the bit about the headmaster, a dashing and brilliant bloke with brown hair who happens to be called Doctor Smith, now  _that_  was all JK’s idea, I had nothing to do with it!”

“No!” Rose gasps, scanning the words in front of her with renewed interest. “Which page? Tell me!”

The Doctor makes a  _pffffft_ noise, rolling his eyes and waving his hand dismissively. “As if I’m vain enough to memorize the page numbers where the Doctor appears! Although if you read the third paragraph on page forty-one, you might find something of interest.” They spend the next few hours like that, sitting on opposite ends of the couch and chatting, Rose coaxing page numbers from him. Eventually silences begin to stretch between them, their eyes drifting closed, and the Doctor makes a show of straightening out the blankets on the top bunk for Rose again.

She climbs in, nestling into the pillow and listening to the bottom bunk creak as he settles down underneath her. Rose stretches the neck of her t-shirt up over her nose, fabric soft against her lips, the scent of the Doctor strong when she inhales. Eyes closing, she turns onto her side and tries to rest.

Sometime before dawn, the sound of gasping pulls her out of sleep. The Doctor is practically hyperventilating, short staccato breaths accompanied by whimpering noises. Rose rolls onto her stomach, shoulder at the edge of the bunk, and leans over to peer down at him in the darkness. He’s kicked off his blankets, he’s in his boxers and a shirt, arms flung over his head and legs twitching. Face twisted into a rictus of horror, he makes a few more stuttering sounds before his entire body flinches and he starts awake, still breathing heavily, eyes wide and wild.

He’s staring at the underside of her bunk, now frozen, a blank expression on his face. The only thing moving is his chest, heaving up and down. Rose can’t tell if the Doctor is paralyzed in fear, or keeping still in order to gain control over his panic. Either way, he seems completely unaware of her presence, unaware that she’s even in the room.

Her fists clench. She has missed so many years of this one life the Doctor has, it makes her furious and nauseated and desperate, it makes her want to cry and scream. It makes her want to crawl down the ladder and take him into her arms, ask about his nightmare, ask about everything all at once, about whether his dream was actually a memory of something he had to go through alone, without her, because she was gone.

Unable to stand it any longer, Rose whispers his name and extends her arm down toward him, fingers spread open and waiting.

At the sound of his name, the Doctor flinches again, his eyes darting to her. He blinks, surprise flashing across his face. After a long moment he lifts his arm. His fingers shake as they slide between hers, fold together. She grips tightly, like she’s keeping him from tumbling over the edge of a cliff. He sucks in a deep breath, his gaze steady, their hands bridging the space between the two beds. His palm warm and damp, his fingers occasionally squeeze hers like he’s verifying she’s real. She caresses his thumb, slow steady strokes, and his breathing begins to slow down.

They stay like that for a few moments, without talking. Finally Rose says, “I’ll make us some tea.”

The Doctor’s thumb brushes across the inside of her wrist before his fingers slide away. “Sorry if I woke you.” He finally breaks eye contact, sitting up and turning to put his feet on the floor. He slumps forward, scratching at the crown of his head and running his hands through his hair, so close Rose could stretch down and touch it. It’s wild and sticking in every direction imaginable; it looks comfortingly familiar like this, more like she remembers it.

“I was already awake,” she lies.

He stretches his back, elbows jutting out, and stands up. She’s staring at his profile, at the beads of sweat around his temples, the damp nape of his neck. “We’ll need something stronger than tea, we’ve got a long flight back to London.”

“Coffee it is, then,” Rose says with a smile, propping her head up on her elbow. He grabs his jeans and, flashing her a thankful smile, steps into the next room to put them on.

Ten minutes later she brings two mugs of coffee into the wheelhouse, along with the _Samuel Cooper_ book. The anchors are already retracted, the Doctor’s got the engines purring, and the zeppelin is gaining altitude.

Depositing one coffee in front of the Doctor, Rose settles down in the co-captain’s chair. He reaches across to take her hand. She swings their joined arms a little, back and forth between them, before opening the book to the page where they’d left off the night before and beginning to read aloud.


	15. Chapter 15

The Doctor and Rose take turns piloting the zeppelin, and even with a stop in Paris for lunch, they still arrive in London before dark. He makes sure to anchor the zeppelin far away from Jackie and her zoning laws. Not  _because_  of Jackie, really, or the prospect of getting shouted at – more because traveling across London itself can be an adventure, if he manages it properly.

Naturally the Doctor and Rose need to eat after the long flight from Italy. They stop off for a burger and chips, and the Doctor is certain the other diners are all staring at Rose because of the lake of vinegar she put on her chips, and not her strawberry-stained top, but mentioning it only earns him a cross look and a gentle kick to the shin under the table.

After dinner, Rose insists they stop by Henrik’s. Since her mother gave away Rose’s wardrobe years ago, and the Doctor managed to ruin her one nice top in Italy, she drags him to every corner of the shop, piling his arms high with clothes.

The saleswoman is initially thrilled to have a Tyler, of the  _Vitex_  Tylers, with the  _Vitex_ Tylers’ charge account on file, as her customer. She’s less thrilled when the Doctor keeps side-eyeing her and eventually remarks on the excessive hair coming out of her four facial moles – clear evidence of someone who’s handled xurexil spice, and doesn’t she know that the transportation and sale of xurexil spice is currently outlawed in this sector of the Milky Way? Violations are punishable by having one’s brains turned into soup for the Grand Emir of Xurexil Prime. He wouldn’t dream of reporting her, of course, but he’s certain he isn’t the first to notice those four enormous moles and all that hair, and she ought to be more careful, is all he’s saying. Maybe look into some electrolysis, at a minimum, to disguise the evidence of her criminal activities.

The upshot is that the woman leaves them in relative peace, and Rose is staring at him like he’s done something phenomenally embarrassing, or maybe a bit clever – or maybe both. Also, after that the Doctor is the only one waiting every time Rose steps out of the dressing room to ask what he thinks about the clothes she’s chosen. It takes him quite a while to make up his mind – he has to inspect each ensemble from every angle, for the sake of giving a well-informed opinion.

It’s just past midnight when their cab finally pulls up to the front of the Pete and Jackie’s. The Doctor helps Rose carry her shopping to the door. They stop on the threshold, an ocean of Henrik’s bags on the ground between them.

“Until Thailand, then,” the Doctor blurts out, forcing cheerfulness.

“Next week. Yeah.” Rose stares at her hands for a long moment before clearing her throat. “Where are you going to go now?”

“Don’t worry about me,” the Doctor replies with a tight smile. “There’s the BLIMP – I always sleep better with the sound of engines in the walls. And I ought to check in on a few experiments I have running in that warehouse I told you about. Y’know, make sure the block is still intact, it hasn’t been turned into gelatin or made invisible. I’ll get an earful from the landlord if that’s happened again. And I promised Donna I’d pop by for a visit, too. Plenty to keep busy, really.”

Rose meets his eyes with sudden courage. “You could stay here. Or I could come with you, right now.” Her cheeks have turned bright pink, and her hands flutter until she clasps them together. “What I mean is, you don’t have to go. Please, Doctor. Stay. With me.”

The Doctor stares at her, bottom lip pinched by her teeth, eyes full of hope.

He wants to, oh god he wants to. The idea of leaving her makes his marrow cold, because he’s afraid if he lets her out of his sight, she’ll vanish again. Or maybe he’ll wake up, this dream will be over, and he’ll be alone again.

But none of this is about him, it can’t be about him. It’s about her.  

“Rose, I …” He pulls in a deep breath, steadies himself. “When we first came to this universe together, I felt my one life ticking away so acutely – I still do, sometimes – but it made me afraid, then. I was  _terrified_. And I rushed things. The TARDIS. You. All of it.

“Hurrying things along ended in disaster. I’m not going to repeat that mistake. I’m never going to put you through anything like that again. This time, we’ll do everything right. I want you to have all the time and space you need to pick up your life, here and now. Slow, steady. I’m a patient man.” He nods decisively.

“When was the last time you were at the Laundromat and you waited until your clothes were completely dry before you pulled them out of the machine?” Rose says.

“Fair point.”

“Just promise me, Doctor, that you won’t go far.”

“Don’t think I could, even if I was inclined.”

Rose throws her arms around his shoulders, nuzzling her face into his neck. Her breath is humid against his skin, her hands curling at the base of his skull. She draws away just far enough to come up onto her tiptoes and pull his head down, planting a kiss on his forehead. His entire body feels like it’s curved down toward her, into her. He wants to shove her up against the wall like he did in Nemi, to make love to her here and now, to jump headfirst with his eyes closed into a life with Rose. The idea of walking away, even just temporarily, even just for a week, it aches in his throat and in his lungs.

All of this is miraculous – and if there’s one thing the Doctor has learned in the last few years of this human life, it’s that miracles are fragile, fragile things.

Rose’s mouth touches his, lips closed, pressure steady. A noise rises from the depths of his chest, unbidden; his arms tighten around her, lifting her up off the ground as he pulls her against his body.

The cabbie blasts his horn. Both the Doctor and Rose twitch in surprise, and he drops her back onto her feet. Almost immediately afterward, a light pops on in a nearby window, and the muffled sound of someone moving comes from the other side of the front door.  

“I’m coming with you to Cambridge. I want to meet this universe’s Donna,” Rose says in a tone that leaves no room for argument. “It’s high time I get to know her properly. And tell her thanks.”

“Thanks? For what?”

“For keeping you in one piece.” She brushes at an invisible speck of lint on his shoulder, biting her lip again. “It isn’t an easy job.”

The doorknob clicks and the front door swings open. Rose peels herself off of the Doctor and takes a step back as Pete, standing in his jimjams and dressing gown, squints at them. “Doctor, it’s good to see you again.”

The Doctor smiles in genuine pleasure and sticks out his hand. Pete shakes it, and the Doctor says, “You’re looking well, Pete Tyler. Jackie’s feeding you, I see.”

Pete glances down at his own stomach in mild alarm, as though he’s suddenly wondering whether he can see his own toes or not. “You two don’t have to stand out here all night, yammering right under our bedroom window,” he says. “I’m sure we’ve got some tea in the kitchen and some chairs to sit in or something.”

Rose looks at the Doctor; the Doctor keeps his eyes on Pete and shakes his head. “I have a few things to see to.” He finally turns to her. “Cambridge, day after tomorrow?”

Rose smiles brightly, but there’s disappointment in her eyes. “I’ll bring a change of clothes this time.”

He’s halfway back to the cab when he hears Rose’s trainers crunching across the gravel, barreling toward him. Turning around just in time to catch her in his arms, he’s nearly knocked backward at the force of her embrace. “Oof!”

“I’m sorry,” she says into his chest, face buried against him, “I’m sorry I didn’t say it before the TARDIS pulled me away from you for five years. I should’ve said it every day, because it was true. It  _is_  true. I said it on Bad Wolf Bay, even though you were convinced we’d never see each other again, because I couldn’t stand the thought of you not knowing. It happened anyway, five years of you doubting me and how I feel, and I just –” Her hands ball into fists against his shoulderblades, wadding his shirt.

Pulling her head up, she gently takes the Doctor by the sides of his head and comes onto her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. It’s gentle and chaste, but the way her face lingers alongside his, the huff of breath in her chest, there’s nothing chaste about those things. The way her gaze meets his when she pulls away, eyes like pools of simmering honey, it’s  _galaxies_  away from chaste.

“We can take things as slowly as you want. I’m here, when you’re ready,” she says. “And I love you, Doctor.”

The Doctor knows he ought to say something –  _How very thoughtful of you, Rose_ , or maybe  _Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it?_ , or  _There’s a perfect little flat for rent on the other side of London, shall we pick out china patterns and a wedding venue on the way?_  Somewhere between this human body and this Time Lord brain, the wiring’s got crossed, and he stands silent and motionless as Rose gives him a nervous smile and ducks her head before dashing back to the front door and disappearing inside with Pete.

“Mate, you coming? I got other fares I could be catching,” the cabbie barks from behind him.

Staggering back a step, the Doctor plops down into the back of the cab and automatically says the address of his warehouse. Muttering in irritation, the cabbie peels out of the driveway.

They’re four blocks away when it hits the Doctor, what he should’ve said to Rose. The perfect words in reponse to “I love you,” the  _exact thing_.

“Stop!” he tells the cabbie, frantic, scrabbling at the door handle as he digs in his pockets and randomly yanks out pound notes, tossing them into the front seat. “Stop the cab!”

The car squeals to a halt, and the Doctor flings himself out the door, several hundred-pound notes fluttering in his wake. He takes off down the dark pavement, legs churning and chest puffed out and moving with a speed that might fool a casual observer into thinking he was being chased by a female acid-dragon from the Jubtraw system, one that happened to be in heat. 

He sprints up the driveway, but the lights are already off downstairs. Without stopping, he makes for the garden wall, scales it in record time, and finds that all the lights are off in the back, too – all except one, a window on the second floor. Dashing like a shadow around the perimeter of the yard, he shimmies up Tony’s climbing hedge.

His pulse throbs in his ears, a heady rush of human hormone stimulants eddying around his brain. This is more dizzying than dangling over the pit on Krop Tor, hanging by a thin rope and a harness, preparing himself to let go, to  _fall_. Except this time, there’s no chance he’ll regenerate if he hits bottom; without that air pocket to cushion his impact, he’s done for.

The nearest window is cracked open to let in the breeze. The Doctor peers inside. Fast asleep in bed, Tony’s cradling a stuffed orange bunny in one arm and an Ugwollian astrolabe in the other. Quietly, the Doctor slides the window open the rest of the way and ducks into the room. Tony stirs, mutters in his sleep and clutches the astrolabe closer, but doesn’t wake up.

Stepping carefully to avoid the toys laid out on the carpet like land mines, the Doctor makes it into the corridor. Light shines under the door to the guest room at the end of the hallway – the same room the Doctor had slept in so many years ago, when Rose had first disappeared and he couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her flat and sleeping by himself.

He probably ought to knock – it would be prudent, polite – but the thought doesn’t occur to him before he reaches the door.

The only thing banging around inside his head are those words, those  _perfect words_ that he needs to say to Rose Tyler, because she loves him. And god help him, after five years of trying to convince himself he should move on, he’s still so wildly in love with her he can hardly think straight.

With the same certainty with which he’d unclipped his harness from the rappelling rope on Krop Tor, the Doctor turns the doorknob. He opens the door and walks into Rose’s room. 


	16. Chapter 16

Rose is in the bathroom, rinsing toothpaste out of her mouth, when she hears the bedroom door open. Rolling her eyes, she suppresses a sigh. Her mum has good intentions, she’s sure – she’s missed Rose for years, just like the Doctor. But Rose isn’t inclined to have a post-date heart-to-heart like they used to when Rose was sixteen years old; she’s not in the mood.

Toothbrush still in hand, she leans around the bathroom doorframe. “Mum, I’m tired, can we wait until –”

The Doctor is standing in her bedroom door. Rose’s mouth drops open, her toothbrush angling toward him in disbelief.

“Sod it!” he declares gleefully, almost proudly, the same way he would if he was presenting her with a new alien life form, or a clever way to escape from the cell they’ve been locked in on some planet halfway across the galaxy – waiting for her to give him a round of applause.

“B-beg pardon?” Rose steps into the bedroom, wiping a dribble of water from her chin with the back of her wrist.

“No wait, that’s not quite right.” The Doctor’s forehead creases, his brows drawing together in consternation. He frowns, whirling around to close the door behind him. Then he moves forward suddenly, grabbing her by the arms and drawing her into the bedroom. She’s spun around to face the opposite direction, like they’re dancing, and he’s muttering under his breath “Angled northwest, like so – good. And I’m here, left leg forward. Mmm, still something’s off.”

Coming to stand in front of her, he leans to one side, then the other, studies the space behind her and licks his finger before sticking it up in the air, like he’s testing for the direction of a wind inside a closed room. His gaze finally scans over her with the same attention he’s been giving everything else.

His eyes widen, his bottom lip sticking out a little. “Oh dear. Rose, you seem to have … lost your top.”

She glances down at her own cleavage, encased in a frilly pink bra and nothing else. Her chest suddenly feels cold, like that nonexistent wind the Doctor was testing for finally kicked up. Her cheeks, on the other hand, are scalding. He’s still staring right at her breasts, because this new and unexpected variable has radically altered whatever bizarre equation he’s working on.

“I’m getting ready for bed,” she retorts, putting one hand on her hip and waving the toothbrush in his face with the other. “What did you expect, barging into my room after you’ve said goodnight?”

With obvious effort, he redirects his gaze from her breasts to her face.

“I’ll take that.” The Doctor plucks the toothbrush from her fingers. He tosses it over his shoulder, onto the floor, without a second thought. The grin comes back, small and full of promise; he rubs his hands together in anticipation.

“This is close enough, I suppose. The effect should be comparable, given the variables that can be controlled and the atmospheric differences. The lack of moonlight might hamper things, but not to the extent I should move us back to the driveway, so there’s no help for it.” He visibly braces himself. “All right Rose, I’m ready. Say the thing again.”

Her embarrassment is fading into puzzled irritation. “Say what? What’s going on?”

“The thing about being in love with me. Say it again.”

He’s staring at her face, large brown eyes full of happy anticipation, so very excited about whatever it is that’s happening right now, whatever it is he wants to show her.

She’s got plenty of lost time to make up for, in terms of telling him how much she adores him. Even in the midst of this sort of barmy alien behavior,  _especially_  in the midst of it, because Rose is well-aware that she didn’t lose her heart to a human, she lost it to the most wonderful, incomprehensible creature in the universe.

“Doctor, I love you,” she says, smiling.

“Sod it!” he crows triumphantly.

“Right. Still not getting it.” Rose squints, shaking her head, trying not to panic. She’d thought everything was going so well, and now  _this_ is his response to her declaration of love?  _This_  was what he wanted to say to her in the driveway, that he hadn’t been able to get out?

“Four years, three months, nine days, and some-odd hours ago, I came to the conclusion you’d left this universe on purpose. And the second conclusion I reached, right after the first one, was that I needed to get off of Earth. I’ve hunted alien tech from Everest to the Mariana Trench, trying to scrape together a ship with decent engines. Even after I met Donna, knowing she was here didn’t make me want to stay, it just made me want to bring her along when I left. I love this planet, I love humanity, but I needed fresh air. Fresh horizons. Different constellations.

“Ever since our conversation inside the TARDIS two days ago, when I realized you hadn’t left on purpose, I haven’t thought about leaving Earth. Not  _once_  has the idea occurred to me. Not even after you deposited the TARDIS in my hands and told me I could go.” The Doctor reaches up with his left hand, shoving his fingers into his hair and tugging, as though he’s trying to pull out his thoughts by the root and show her proof. “Don’t you see?”

“You want to stay,” Rose says cautiously.

“Yes! Precisely! I’ve been trying to escape for years.” He gestures toward her. “But now here you are, standing in front of me. Fresh horizons, different constellations. A lifetime of them, contained inside a pink and yellow human package with a human life and really …  _really_  perfect breasts.”

A laugh bursts out of her, relief and amusement.

“We can find those other planets, those other stars, if we want to. Together. Or we can stay here. Together. Or we can do both, but the point is, Rose Tyler, no matter how long I’ve spent trying to convince myself otherwise, I’m still mad for you. So sod it – trying to muddle through the middle separately, so everything comes out right for us together in the end. Sod the waiting, the wanting – I’ve been doing those things for too long, all alone. But not for another second.”

She’s swept right up off her feet into his embrace. He whirls her around, leaning her backward as his lips meet hers, open and warm. He’s snogging her like he did in Nemi, but this time there’s no strawberry beer on his breath, and she’s not the slightest bit squiffy. His knee nudges between hers, and she’s resting entirely on his arms, she’ll fall flat on the floor if he lets go. God, he’s a phenomenal kisser, even when his wild enthusiasm has the better of him and it ought to be awkward or too much, it’s perfect instead.

He breaks the kiss, his face hovering above hers, so close her eyes nearly cross trying to look at him. Her legs are wobbly, and if he tries to put her on her feet again, she’s going to collapse.

“Mad for me?” Rose says, smiling and nudging his nose with hers.

“To an embarrassing degree.”

“Good. Although if you plan on snogging me in my bra much longer, you should lock the bedroom door. Because if you keep on, I’m going to end up doing that thing to you, so you make that same noise you did last time – the groaning-shouty noise. The one that made the neighbors at my flat pound on the wall and yell for us to be quiet.”

The Doctor falters, something flickering over his expression. Then his eyes light right back up. “Oh – oh, I remember!” Tongue darting out to lick his lips, his breath hitches and arms tremble almost imperceptibly. “I remember.”


	17. Chapter 17

“Doctor?”

He lets Rose go, and she staggers at the suddenness of it. He’s at the door, fumbling with the handle until it locks. Rose wonders if he’s unsteady because he’s eager, or still frightened (in spite of what he’d said), or maybe a bit of both.

She comes up behind him, sliding her arms around his torso and pressing her face against his back. Hands flat on his chest, she rises onto her tiptoes and kisses the place where his shoulder and neck join, right at the collar of his t-shirt. He reaches out to steady himself against the door, fingers splayed wide; his other hand rests atop hers, just over his one heart.

Tilting her head to the opposite side, Rose follows the curve of the Doctor’s collar around the back of his neck. A press of lips, at first; then the tentative contact of tongue. She reaches down with her one free hand and tugs at the hem of his shirt, pulling up. He helps, yanking it over his head in two short movements, letting it fall to the floor.

He shifts, trying to turn around, but Rose wraps him in her arms again, fingers combing through the hair on his chest. He hums at the contact of skin, her stomach and breasts pressed against him. The rounded curve of his upper back, the lean muscles there, she moves her mouth to the head of his left shoulder, to the long, thin scar curving around it. She kisses along the healed skin, wondering how badly the injury hurt, imagining the Doctor lying in a hospital room somewhere, alone.

He turns, lifting his scarred arm so her head fits right under it, pulling her body to his and kissing her on the mouth. There’s a certain kind of hunger in the way he touches her, it’s thrilling and overwhelming and settles in her midsection like a stone thrown into water, ripples of warmth radiating low into her belly. Walking her backward toward the bed, he lets her go just long enough to seize one corner of the duvet and yank the whole thing onto the floor, bringing a cascade of Henrik’s shopping bags along in a clatter of paper.

Rose shoves him sideways and he doesn’t resist, flopping onto the sheets, his gaze locked with hers. He props up on one elbow, cocking an eyebrow at her. Shirtless and in his jeans, with his hair flat against his head, he looks positively alien. Surveying the lines of his chest, remembering the weight of him atop her, between her legs, Rose absently licks the roof of her own mouth.

“Having second thoughts?” the Doctor says. Apparently she was staring longer than she’d realized.

“No,” Rose replies instantly, giving him a half-smile. “You? It’s all right, if everything’s happening too fast. I meant it, I’m not going anywhere, however long you need.”

“Now. Now is good,” he replies, low and breathy.

Grin widening, Rose steps to the foot of the bed to stand right in front of him. Reaching behind her back, she pulls her bra loose and slips the strap from one shoulder, then the other, before dropping it onto the floor. The Doctor takes in the sight of her for a long moment before sitting up at the end of the bed so she’s standing between his knees. She rests her hands on his shoulders and he reaches out almost tentatively, fingertips brushing her stomach and sliding around the curve of her waist. He’s hardly breathing, his chest isn’t moving at all, his eyes open wide as he brings both hands up along the sides of her torso.

“From falling into the boxes of strawberries yesterday?” the Doctor asks, his thumb lightly stroking over the bruise at the top of her right breast.

“From a week ago. You left it there, the last time we made love.”

When he brings his face to her chest, it isn’t exactly as Rose expected; he turns his head sideways, resting his cheek and forehead between her breasts. He takes a breath, slow and deep, and she feels a tremor run through his body.

Her hands move to cradle the Doctor’s head, stroke his hair. He kisses the curve of her breast. Rose closes her eyes, leaning forward as he makes his way across her chest, tongue and lips and suction, lavishing attention in precisely the right way. His hands hold her steady, even as she feels the urge to move with him, to sway in rhythm with the pounding blood in her ears and the throbbing ache between her legs.  

As his mouth remains occupied at her breasts, his hands work at the button on her trousers, then the zip. She buries her fingers in his hair as he hooks his thumbs over the sides and pulls the trousers over her hips, so they fall the rest of the way. She steps back and kicks the trousers out of the way before pushing him down on the bed and stripping off his jeans.

~~~~~

The Doctor has not been entirely starved for human contact during the time Rose was gone – he’s picked up a few companions here and there, brought them along for weeks at a time, on occasion. He’s had Donna for the last few years, even if she doesn’t travel with him full-time. He’s talked with, held hands, hugged, shared space with plenty of people.

But there’s something about Rose’s touch that’s  _different,_  in both kind and degree. The way it triggers his nerve endings, human and Time Lord all mixed together, until he gets so lost in sensation that he forgets everything in the universe except what’s happening here and now, between them. The way he notices every little detail, like stroking inside her elbow raises the hair on her arm, and licking the shell of her ear produces a delightful hum in her throat, and the way her toes curl against the top of his feet when she’s lying alongside him, bodies pressed together.

Or, at this particular moment, the way she’s leaning over his prone form, both hands working in long smooth movements, coaxing noises from him with every touch and stroke. For the first time since she came back, the Doctor doesn’t think about the time that has passed since they were last together like this. He manages to force his eyes open, to watch. Because he needs to see her – he’s never going to see her enough, not with sixty-something years left in this human body, there’s not enough time to drink in her presence. Rose meets his gaze, a smug grin on her face, obviously pleased at how completely he’s at her mercy. Her eyes shift purposefully down to her hands, and her lips open. She licks them, wet and glistening and ready.

“No, no, not yet,” the Doctor says – it isn’t a squeak, really it isn’t. It’s quite manly. “Not yet.” Because what she intends would put an end to things with embarrassing speed. “My turn.”

He pulls her up onto the bed, covers her body with his own, buries his face in her neck, licks his way across her collarbones. He’s relived this experience in his dreams and fantasies for years. Even when he went through bouts of intense fury with her for leaving, she was the one he thought about in the darkness; her name was the one on his lips (snarled, moaned, spit like a curse); her face was the one he saw when he closed his eyes.

He watches Rose with rapt attention as he touches her, tastes her – things he hasn’t done in five years, a certain swipe of his tongue and press of his fingers, every bit of it comes back to him with crystal clarity, as though no time has passed at all. The way Rose’s eyes close and her face scrunches with concentration, the twitch of her shoulders and the bump of her thighs against his ears. How her entire being tenses up right before she shudders and chokes out his name, reaching down to clutch at his hair, trembling from head to toe.

Rose’s eyes blink open, rivet to his, and she says the thing the Doctor once imagined in the depths of his darkest, loneliest moments, when he was consumed with fury because Rose had left, when he burned with rage and the urge to repay her pain for pain – she whispers, “Please, Doctor. Please.”

The Doctor’s reaction is instantaneous, growl low in his throat as he crawls the length of her body. His kiss is brutal and needy, and she arches into it.

He’s already positioned between her legs, but he pauses; he wants to hear her beg one more time, to lick the word  _please_ off her tongue as he enters her. “Say it again.”

Rose replies without hesitation, full of conviction: “I love you, Doctor.”

She rises up to meet him and he’s inside her as the words register. He’s wrapped up in her arms, her legs, her warmth, she’s  _here_. It occurs to him, that he wants her to come again, but it’s so much – everything is so much – he doesn’t last nearly long enough. This time, when Rose’s name is on the Doctor’s lips, it isn’t a curse or a growl, it’s supplication.  

She holds him afterward, lets him rest atop her for a long, breathless moment. Her fingers curl against his scalp and she plants soft and adoring kisses along the corner of his mouth, his cheeks, his nose.

“That was interesting,” he pants, rolling off and flopping bonelessly beside her.

Her laugh shakes the bed. “Oi! If you’re angling for a smack, you’re off to a good start.”

“No no no, sex was better than I remembered. Not just sex in general – sex with you in particular, I mean. It was completely  _brilliant_ ,” he says, head lolling to the side to look at her. “Which is saying something, considering how thoroughly I catalogued the experience last time, and how often I’ve revisited those memories since. Being part human now, I thought I’d exaggerated how fantastic it was, viewed it through rose-tinted glasses. If you’ll pardon the expression.”

Beaming, Rose comes onto her side to stare at him. “Just this once.”

“Quite kind, thank you. What I mean to say, is that my memories didn’t come close to doing the experience justice.”

She reaches up, tracing a finger down the side of his face and the length of his neck. “So you’ve thought about me – about this – since the last time?”

“It’s positively primal,” the Doctor says with a longsuffering sigh. “I blame the half-human bit, hormones all willy-nilly. When it comes to the idea of sex with Rose Tyler, I’m the epitome of a stupid ape. I wonder if chimpanzees have to deal with this relentlessly vivid an imagination?”

“I should hope chimpanzees don’t have fantasies about me,” Rose says, shifting closer and settling against his side, her head resting on the pillow beside his. “This is new, then? You never had fantasies, before the whole … metacrisis thing?”

“Oh well – the idea of shagging your brains out might’ve occurred to me, once or twice before. Against the console, or on the table in the kitchen, or on that especially fluffy tuffet in the throne room on Halifatt. Do you remember that tuffet? Big as a horse, just to hold one of the High Regent’s feet.”

“Wait … the High Regent of Halifatt? The enormous thing that looked like a blobfish with legs? The alien who sentenced us to a lifetime of labor in his sulfur mines? You thought about shagging me while we were  _there_?”

“It was a very fluffy tuffet!” the Doctor replies indignantly. “It looked bouncy.”

Rose has completely lost her composure, she’s dissolved into a fit of giggles. She’s giddy, utterly exultant, and it’s because of him. Because he’s here, with her.

Rolling onto her back, Rose lifts her legs up into the air, then lets them plop down heavily onto the bed. The mattress vibrates underneath them, undulating a little. “Do you suppose this mattress is bouncier than the tuffet?”

The Doctor follows her example, lifting his legs and letting them thump back down so the mattress jumps. “Moderate modulus of rigidity, probably a greater dampening coefficient, I’d say the elasticity of this mattress is less than the elasticity of the High Regent’s tuffet.” He sits up suddenly. “But there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

“No, Doctor – you’ll wake up Tony!”

“Nah, Tony’s room is miles away.” In a flash, he’s on his feet, jumping atop the mattress. Rose lets out a contained shriek, scrambling to her feet and jumping beside him.


	18. Chapter 18

Morning light is streaming through the windows when there’s a knock at the bedroom door. The Doctor and Rose are a pile of tangled limbs and blankets, sprawled across the bed together. He starts awake at the noise, and Rose leaps out of his arms – and out of bed – with stunning speed. With a loud crinkling noise, she stumbles over the Henrik’s bags in her hurry to find a bedsheet to wrap up in.

“Rose? You going to lay around in bed all day? Breakfast is ready!” Jackie calls from the corridor.

“I’m getting dressed, I’ll be down in a mo’!” Rose calls back.

“The door’s locked, she can’t come in,” the Doctor murmurs, keeping his voice down so Jackie won’t hear, as he sits up to watch Rose clutch the sheet around her body. The room is a wreck, bags and pillows and linens strewn everywhere, the mattress slightly crooked on the boxspring.

Scratching his head and yawning, the Doctor tries to recall whether they’d overturned the overstuffed armchair in the corner during their second or third round of sex. It’s all a blissful blur at the moment; he’s counting on the details sharpening up after a nice hot cup of tea.  
“You didn’t grow up with my mum, you don’t know the extent of her x-ray vision,” Rose grumbles, nudging a shopping bag out of the way with her foot as she heads toward the lavatory. “It was the bane of my sixteen-year-old existence.”

“You sneaked boys into your room at your mum’s flat when you were sixteen?” he calls after her.

Rose leans around the doorframe, hairbrush in her hand. “Who said I sneaked anybody anywhere? Ever considered that maybe you aren’t the first bloke so smitten with me he climbed in through the window to confess his love?” Her eyebrows wiggle as she shoots him a look. She vanishes again.

The Doctor manages to stand up and locate his clothing. He’s got his jeans on, and he’s about to pull on his shirt when Rose reappears. Her hair is brushed, her face washed, and she wraps her arms around him before he can finish. She kisses his neck, and his shoulder, and her lips brush against his scar for the dozenth time since yesterday. 

He quietly clears his throat. “The South American State and I didn’t get along.”

“What?” Rose blinks at him.

“The scar. You keep touching it.”

She frowns in confusion. “You didn’t get along with an entire continent?”

The Doctor stares at her hair, reaching up to sweep it away from her face, fiddling with it more than is warranted. “It’s a long story.”

“Maybe you can tell me, sometime.”

“Maybe.” In point of fact, the mere thought makes the Doctor want to wiggle right out of Rose’s arms and crawl back under the duvet. He might even burrow through the headboard into the dark space between the walls, for good measure.

“Are you hungry?”

It’s not exactly subtle, her change in conversation in response to his obvious discomfort, but he’ll take it. “Ravenous! I know a cafe not far from here, they have brilliant banana scones.”

“Doctor …” Her tongue pokes out between her teeth as she considers her words. “I haven’t seen my family in years. My mum’ll be devastated if I disappear again too quickly, without even a proper hello. We could eat breakfast here, and then go see that warehouse you’ve been talking about?” Rose squeezes his arm encouragingly.

Pressure mounts in his chest, comes right up his windpipe. Sitting around a table, talking about the weather, or Pete’s work, or whatever it is Jackie spends her days doing. Asking someone to pass the cream, being asked to hand over the salt. Getting stared at when he licks jam off his fingers, or chided for eating his tenth piece of bacon.

After admitting to himself, and Rose, that he’s still in love with her after so many years, after staying the night – he’s already feeling raw, vulnerable. The idea of sitting down for breakfast with Rose’s family sounds … incredibly drastic. Suffocating.

Domestic.

“I – ahhhh – now I come to think of it, the experiments I’ve got running at the warehouse, they probably ought to be looked in on sooner rather than later,” he says, staring up at the ceiling and rubbing his chin with the heel of his hand. “I’ll just pop out the back door, maybe stop around again later this evening? I’ve got a friend, he’s from this planet where they can’t speak, they sing all the time instead. Now he’s headlining at the Royal Opera House! I helped him with this thing – a bit of trouble – a few months back, and he told me I could have a box seat to his performance anytime.”

Rose is disappointed. The tightness in the corner of her eyes, the sad smile, he might not know exactly which thoughts are going through her head, but he knows how she’s feeling. The words that come out instead are, “I’ll be ready and waiting.”

This woman – remarkable, clever, love in her every look and word and gesture – she pops up onto her toes and kisses him. Slow, without need or ulterior motive, just an expression of acceptance and understanding.

One hand around her waist, the other cradling her head, he murmurs, “I love you.”

Grinning into his mouth, she says, “You promise you’ll come to the front door tonight, like a normal person?”

“Of course not.”

“Good.” She snatches the t-shirt from his hand a shoves it into his chest. He follows her mouth for a second, as she backs away – chasing her lips, her tongue, wondering if he has time to pin her on the bed one more time before Jackie bangs on the door again. But Rose is already back in the lavatory, calling out over her shoulder, “I’ll see you tonight.”

He’s out the door and down the hallway within a matter of minutes. The Doctor spent quite a bit of time in this house just after Rose had disappeared. He knows his way around. It doesn’t even occur to him to go down the main staircase to the front door. Instead, he heads directly to Tony’s room.

Tony isn’t there – he’s downstairs already, with his parents.

The Doctor decides he’ll make a quick stop at the shed at the far end of the garden to see how the TARDIS is progressing before he leaves. The window slides open without a sound, and he clambers onto the tall hedges outside, swinging down to the lawn. He reaches the grass, landing with the jaunty hop of a Time Lord riding out a euphoric wave of hormones and happiness.

Just there, sitting at a teak patio table with breakfast spread out in front of them, are Pete and Jackie. Tony is nearby, kicking a football up against the garden wall.

Pete lowers his electronic reader as he catches sight of the Doctor, and frowns. “I ought to cut those hedges right down,” he mutters. “It’s like Paddington Station around here.”

Jackie looks up from a book she’s reading, and an enormous grin spreads across her face. “Told you,” she says happily, nudging Pete’s feet under the table. “Warned you it was a sucker’s bet last night, darling, didn’t I? ‘He won’t stay away for more than an hour,’ I said.”

Pete gives a longsuffering sigh and takes a drink of tea from the mug in front of him. “You just lost me a bet, Doctor, and cost me a new Jaguar. You might as well sit down and have some breakfast.”

“Kettle’s on the stove,” Jackie adds, gesturing toward the house. “Earl Grey’s in the same cabinet it was last time you were here.”

Last time he was here, nearly five years ago. The Doctor opens his mouth, stutters a few syllables, but before he reaches coherence and gives his excuses, Tony shouts “Doctor!” and kicks the football right at him. Out of self-preservation, the Doctor’s foot meets the ball, lands atop it so it won’t roll away.

Tony’s a split-second behind the football, barreling into the Doctor’s arms. “You kept your promise!” he whispers in an overexcited little-boy voice, completely unaware that it’s loud enough for both his parents to hear. “You came back!”

“I suppose I did,” the Doctor replies, hugging him in return.

“Da’s home from work today so we can go to the zoo.” Tony steps away and shoves his hands in his pockets, like he’s just remembered that big kids don’t fling themselves into hugs with such excited abandon. “I start school Wednseday. Mum’s calling it our last summer hurrah. You’ll come, too, won’t you?”

His youthful face is full of hope, blue eyes wide. The Doctor finally manages, “I’m sorry, Tony, but I have a few things, just across town – I really ought to –”

“They’ve got a panda in from China, some sort of goodwill zoo exchange. Animal diplomacy, or something. I think we sent them a hedgehog,” Pete interrupts, staring down at his e-reader and pushing a button.

At that moment the patio door opens and Rose steps out, mug clasped in both hands. Her hair is up in a ponytail and she’s wearing one of the new outfits she bought yesterday, a summer dress and a light sweater and sandals. The morning light shines at her from the side, bathing her in a warm golden glow.

She stares at him in surprise. “Doctor, I thought you were off to see to those experiments…”

“We watched him climb out the window, Rose, so don’t bother finishing whatever story you’re about to tell,” Jackie says. “Be a dear and get him a cup of tea, would you? He’s staying for breakfast, and coming to the zoo with us.”

Rose’s eyes swivel back to him, full of the same cautious hope in her brother’s face a moment ago. Except her tongue is touching her upper lip, and the Doctor’s already consumed with the urge to go hold her hand, just like Pete and Jackie are holding hands at the teak table. The Doctor thinks about his warehouse – big and full of machines, quiet except for the echoing sound of his own voice. He thinks about the lonely taxi ride to get there. He thinks about turning around, stepping outside the gate just behind him, and leaving.

The thoughts exist inside his head, but the possibility of moving his feet, of actually executing the movements, are far beyond his capacity this morning.

It’s like the Doctor’s been caught in a gravity field, except he isn’t trapped, he’s where he should’ve been all along. His orbit isn’t quite settled, it’s bound to wobble and shift before everything’s sorted out, but it’s all going to get sorted relative to Rose Tyler.

Of course, he’ll have to convince Rose to move into his zeppelin, at least until the TARDIS is big enough to have living quarters. Because the Doctor hasn’t survived nine hundred years of time and space, monsters from one end of the galaxy to the other, to end up seeing Jackie Tyler’s face every morning. And he’s going to take Rose to meet Donna tomorrow, because he has so much to tell Donna he’s nearly bursting with it. 

But for now, at this moment, the idea of breakfast – which was so suffocating and domestic – it’s not completely suffocating anymore.

At least, not if Jackie still keeps a box of that brand of Earl Grey he likes so much in her kitchen.

“I’ll show you where the mugs are,” Rose says, tilting her head toward the door, lifting her eyebrows. 

The Doctor knows quite well where the mugs are, but he kicks the football back to Tony and replies, “I’d like that.” 

Jackie smiles knowingly at Pete as the Doctor walks over to take Rose’s hand, and she leads him into the house.

THE END


End file.
